Students and researchers at Virginia Tech College of Engineering have created the death of us all a human-sized autonomous robotic jellyfish, to better study the locomotion of the unusual real-life animal that was its inspiration.

It's based on the lion's mane jellyfish, the world's largest known species of jellyfish, which can reach Shaquille O'Neal-like sizes in its northern oceanic habitats. The students hope to learn more about how the jellyfish moves--and why it's so big. Results have already shown that the larger jellyfish has a greater efficiency than a smaller one--it uses less energy to travel the same distance.

Virginia Tech: Autonomous Robotic Jellyfish from virginiatech on Vimeo.

This particular robot is powered by a rechargeable nickel metal hydride battery, and will be tasked with operating on its own for weeks at a time. That's a big change from this team's previous robotic jelly, which we covered here. This one moves by a series of eight metal arms, which pulse in and out in a fashion reminiscent of the real-life jellyfish.

The "body," such as it is, is a large, squooshy cap of silicon, more than 5.5 feet in diameter. This is very similar to the actual body of the lion's mane jellyfish, and, as you can see in the video above, it moves in a realistic way as well.

There's some kind of environmental issue/plague/apocalypse killing America's honeybees, but years after it first started happening, scientists are still putting together what it might be. Meanwhile, 2012 was the worst year ever.

Before about 2005, beekeepers might lose 5 to 10 percent of their hives when winter rolled around. Now some beekeepers are losing more than 50 percent to what's called colony collapse disorder. New pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are implanted directly into plants, might be to blame, but nothing's definitive, the New York Times reports.

That means a poor yield for beekeepers, and ultimately problems for consumers. Bees don't just make honey, remember, but pollinate a ton of what we eat--as much as a fourth of it. That could lead to less food and higher food prices. Hopefully the problem gets fully diagnosed--and fixed--sooner than later.

[New York Times]

Want to win this addictive Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• Please Don't Panic: A Texas Biodefense Lab Loses A Vial Of Virus
• GameSci: What Is (Scientifically!) The Most Addictive Game Ever?
• The Chemistry of Kibble
• Computer Tracks Spider Species By Analyzing Webs

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• Popular Science Bracket: And The Winner Is...
• Super-Fashionable Zoo Animals And Other Amazing Images From This Week
• SCOTUS Justices Can't Find Science On Same-Sex Marriage
• How A Tool For Perfect Human Vision Grew From One Of NASA's Greatest Blunders
• Meet Mathieu Mirano, The Science Geek Of The Fashion World
• Speed Of Light In Vacuum Is Not Actually Constant, Study Finds
• Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, And Even The New T-Mobile Are Trying To Screw You
• James Cameron Donates His Custom-Built Submarine To Science
• Is North Korea Forcing Diplomats To Sell Drugs Abroad?
• Investigators Discover 50th Fake Study By Disgraced Dutch Psychologist
• Speed Of Light In Vacuum Is Not Actually Constant, Study Finds
• Google Flu Trends Misrepresented the Severity of This Year's Flu Season [Infographic]
• 16,000 Dead Pigs In The Huangpu: Can You Still Drink Shanghai's Water?
• The Most Incredible Pictures Of Every Planet In Our Solar System

The warp drive proposed by Miguel Alcubierre would achieve faster-than-light speeds by distorting space-time. The device would generate a field of negative energy that would squeeze or stretch space-time, creating a bubble. The bubble would ride the distortions like a surfer on a wave. As evidenced in the big bang, space-time can expand so quickly that objects move faster than the speed of light.

1) The vertical dimension represents how much a given volume of space-time expands or contracts in Alcubierre's model. Positive values [red] imply an expansion. When space-time expands behind a craft, it propels the ship forward.

2) Inside the warp bubble, neutral space-time would leave the ship undisturbed. Passengers would experience a gravitationally calm zero-G environment.

3) Negative values [blue] imply a contraction in space-time. The contraction balances the expansion of space-time as the bubble moves forward.

THE OBSTACLES

Negative Energy: Creating a warp drive requires negative energy-a mysterious form of matter that repels rather than attracts. While predicted to exist, it has never been measured in a laboratory, and known methods for creating it are extremely limited; they would generate so much positive (normal) energy that any negative energy effects would likely be drowned out.

Faster-Than-Light Limitation: If scientists could generate a powerful field of negative energy, they would need to position some of it in front of the craft. "The problem," says Alcubierre, "is that you wouldn't be able to make this field reach the region you need." In other words, to get the energy in front of the craft, it would need to move at faster-than-light speeds, which is impossible.

Destabilization: Even if scientists could generate and position a field of negative energy, there is little reason to think the integrity of the field would hold. A group of Spanish and Italian researchers wrote a paper in 2010 arguing that quantum mechanical radiation, analogous to the Hawking radiation that appears at the event horizon of black holes, would show up and "inevitably lead to [the warp bubble's] destabilization whenever superluminal speeds are attained."

Read the Popular Science profile of NASA engineer Harold "Sonny" White and his research into warp drives here, from the April 2013 issue of the magazine.

Pretty much anything can be a computer, if it can compute logical functions, store data, and transmit information -- even living cells. A team at Stanford University has accomplished one of the the final tasks necessary to turn cells into working computers: They've created a biological transistor, called a transcriptor, that uses DNA and RNA instead of electrons and responds to logical functions.

Drew Endy, an assistant professor of bioengineering, has previously made other vital contributions to biocomputing. Last year, his lab developed a "biological Internet" that can transmit genetic information between cells, as well as a rewritable data storage system for DNA.

Building a system with logic gates that can compute true-false answers from biochemical information is the third component in creating a biological computer. The work is detailed online in Science.

Rather than regulating electrons along a wire, the transcriptor controls the flow of RNA polymerase (the enzyme that produces RNA) along a strand of DNA. To create biocomputers that would be able to function across a wide variety of organisms, the researchers used enzymes that function in animals, plants, bacteria and fungi. Like a transistor, which amplifies electrical signals to allow them to travel farther, the transcriptor can amplify genetic logic, allowing small changes in enzyme activity to trigger much larger changes in gene expression.

Because it can compute digital logic (with Boolean Integrase Logic gates, or, awesomely, BIL gates) it could tell you if the cell has been exposed to stimuli like caffeine or glucose. You could program the cell to start or stop reproducing based on certain factors, and using Endy's biological Internet, coordinate behavior across groups of cells.

This could allow us to one day detect disease and deliver medicine from within the body itself. The researchers have put their work into the public domain in the hopes that other scientists will build upon their research and usher in the biocomputing age as quickly as possible.

[Extreme Tech]

Mining is incredibly dangerous for lots of reasons, but simple fatigue is the worst--after long shifts operating heavy equipment, it's easier to make a mistake. Sixty-five percent of mining accidents are caused by fatigue. The European Space Agency has a solution, using satellites and gyroscopes designed for space.

A new system designed with ESA's help can detect tiny changes in the motion of mining trucks, which are gigantic and often operated during 12-hour shifts. Built by a spinoff called EstrellaSat, this new system uses gyroscopes designed for use in satellites, which can detect small changes in braking, steering and acceleration. By analyzing those changes, the system (and trained workers) can detect the early signs of fatigue, even before a driver is aware he's getting sleepy.

The system also uses satellites to transmit information, because most mines are not in areas with amazing 3G coverage. ESA set up a data link for constant communication between the fatigue monitor and a mine office hundreds of miles away, so staff can analyze the driver patterns. In tests last fall, the system helped reduce fatigue partly by making drivers more aware of it, according to an ESA news release. Now EstrellaSat has a contract to cover 30 drivers using 10 trucks at a high-altitude mine in the Peruvian Andes.

Next up, the company plans to develop a vest, derived from astronaut health-monitoring equipment, which miners can wear to keep tabs on things like heart rate, body temperature and other fatigue-predictors.

Cats, and many other mammals, like to pee on things. It's called "urine marking," and acts as a form of communication through scent (and, to a lesser extent, a visual signal). A new, very important study in the Journal of Zoology found that the way cats--specifically, the European wildcat--mark is intentional and particular.

Felis silvestris the European wildcat, looks like a slightly larger and stockier version of a housecat. (Its taxonomical separation from the housecat is complicated by the fact that wildcats and housecats interbreed often.) Wildcats are highly territorial, and mark their territory by urinating and leaving strategic poops all around their areas. "When urine spraying, a wildcat raises up its tail and ejects backwards a spray of urine against a prominent object of its surrounding environment," says the new study.

But as it turns out, wildcats look for specific kinds of trees and plants to mark, based on how well those plants natural characteristics will spread the scent of the mark. It was assumed that cats merely mark large objects--marking the biggest tree or biggest rock, for example--but that's not the case. European wildcats favor the juniper tree, not choosing it for its size but selecting it over larger, nearby non-juniper trees. The juniper is a highly aromatic and oily tree (it's a major component in the flavoring of gin, for example) and the cat chooses the juniper because, the study suggests, its natural oils will mesh with the cat's scent to make the mark more powerful than the mark is alone. The study says that therefore, wildcats "select those plants which could enhance the olfactory effectiveness of the mark." It's not totally clear how, chemically, scent marks interact with the volatile organic compounds in the juniper, but it is clear that the cats choose those more than other plants.

Cats: they don't just pee anywhere.

Read the whole study here (subscription required).

Last week, Google announced the winners of the Google Glass Explorer competition. Like a miniature college-application essay, Twitter users sent out 140-character plans for what they'd do with Google's new spectacles, along with the tag #ifihadglass. So what made these folks so special?

Stanford's Andrej Karpathycrunched some of the numbers to see what it took to win the competition.

BE FAMOUS

There were several celebrities that made it onto the list--from Neil Patrick Harris to Soulja Boy--but although that certainly seemed to improve your odds, you didn't necessarily have to be in the limelight. The Twitter follower distribution breaks down like this: 26 percent of people had less than 100 followers, 61 percent of people had less than 1,000 followers, and 7 percent of people had more than 10,000, according to the data.

So nearly followerless Twitter users still had a shot, presumably while pitching their "#ifihadglass I'd film my birthday so at least someone would come" idea.

USE THESE WORDS IN YOUR APPLICATION

This is a word cloud showing the most-used words in winning #ifihadglass tweets. Very interesting! "Art"? Not very helpful. "World"? Very helpful.

USE THESE WORDS IN YOUR TWITTER PROFILE

This word cloud shows the frequency of words appearing in the winners' Twitter profiles. Some very hip-sounding careers, here. Ideal candidate description: I am a social media/technology designer/nerd enthusiastic about world blogger strategy news.

But it's too late now to use these strategies, unfortunately. Maybe you can still get in to the Google Nose beta.

[Stanford]

This plastic ring system doesn't exactly make the eight-centimeter ball inside less noticeable to the eye-but it does make the ball undetectable to sonar at a specific pitch. Spanish scientists have created the first cloaking device to completely shield a 3-D object from sonar, Science News reported.

Another cool thing about the device: It's one of the simplest invisibility cloaks ever made. Most cloaking devices are made of sophisticated lab-made stuff called metamaterials, which are engineered to have properties that don't appear in nature… you know, like scattering light waves, microwaves or sound waves in such a way that they're invisible to devices that detect those waves. This device, on the other hand, is made of 3-D printed plastic.

The shape of the plastic rings is the secret to its sonar invisibility. Its creators, a team of physicists from Spain, ran computer simulations to find a shape that would scatter sound waves in such a way that they cancel out the scattering by the ball tucked inside. When tested in lab, the rings worked for sound waves of 8.55 kilohertz-"an audible high pitch," Science News reported-aimed at the device from one specific direction.

The device's limitations mean it's a long way from hiding full-sized ships or submarines from sonar. The U.S. Office of Naval Research is studying the possibility of sonar invisibility, however, and partially funded this research.

The Spanish team plans to try to make devices that shield objects from sonar coming from several directions and from a larger range of sound wave frequencies. The team's current plastic cloak appeared in the March 22 issue of Physical Review Letters.

[Science News]

Every few summers in the heavily wooded section of southern Pennsylvania where I grew up, we'd have about a week in which everything we did--hiking through the parks, climbing trees, walking dogs, buying hoagies--would be accompanied by the roar of cicadas. It's not like a chorus of birds, or even the noise of New York City traffic. It's louder, more constant, a hissing, crackling noise like the screaming of the wind itself. Eventually it fades into white noise, but if you leave town for a weekend and come back, you can't believe anyone is talking about anything else. It's like a biblical plague transmitted only in audio.

An even rarer beast is hatching this year. The Magicicada is a genus of cicada with either a 13- or a 17-year lifespan, depending on species. That might be surprising to those not familiar with the cicada, who'd think it only lives for a few weeks at a time. But the Magicicada larvae live underground for nearly their entire lives, feeding on fluids from tree roots in the northeast United States, emerging with only a few weeks life in their lives in enormous numbers to molt into adults, mate, lay eggs, and die.

It was initially thought that the cicadas behaved this way, with such precision and patience, to overwhelm predators with sheer numbers. The cicada has basically no defenses, and is, according to my cats, delicious and very fun to catch. It's prey for birds, foxes, housecats, possums, and anything else on the east coast that wants a little snack. But apparently that's not the case; we're not really sure why they use this life cycle strategy, but one guess is that such a long period between broods could fool predators, who likely won't have been alive (or won't remember) the previous emergence.

Brood II, also known as the "East Coast Brood," is a 17-year cicada due for emergence this summer. It ranges from the Virginia/North Carolina border up through the northern end of the New York City suburbs. Radiolab, one of our favorite science radio shows/podcasts, has come up with a cicada tracker to pinpoint exactly when Brood II will begin "swarmageddon." Starting tonight, Radiolab will be hosting events all over New York City to build DIY trackers that monitor the soil temperature. When the soil eight inches below the surface reaches a steady temperature of 64 degrees F, the cicadas will begin their transformation into a massive, millions-strong hatch-fest.

The detector, which can be made with parts easily obtainable at any Radioshack (or online), costs about $80. You can then report your findings to Radiolab, starting at the latest in mid-April, so we can see on Radiolab's interactive map just when they'll emerge. The temperature hasn't even cracked 40 degrees yet, so we've got some time before the roar.

Check out the project here.

April Fool's Day sucks, because people on the Internet say things that would be awesome if they were real, and sadly are not. For instance, I would love to be able to search smells. But this idea--which might be real, we aren't sure--is silly: Delivering the mail with drones that can fly for 20 minutes. I mean, most humans can last longer.

According to a news release today, drones are going postal in France. A pilotless pilot program in Auvergne, in central France, is reportedly working with drone-maker Parrot to use its quadrocopters as newspaper carriers.

La Poste Group has been "engaged for many years in an effort to modernize its delivery," the agency explains in a blog post. Parrot is making a new drone for this task, according to La Poste.

To start, 20 postal workers will control the special AR.drones with iPhone or Android apps, just like you can if you buy one. They will be stationed at post offices in residential areas, and will deliver the newspapers before 7 a.m., according to La Poste (translated with Google). If the pilot program works out, the postal service might study whether it's feasible to incorporate even more mail drones.

Delivering the news par avion would help mail carriers avoid unfriendly dogs, apparently: "AR.postal Drone can easily reach remote areas, cross a fence, fly over dogs, or [reach] a high floor," La Poste notes.

But there is one problem: These things can fly for, like, 20 minutes on a charge, which takes about an hour to 90 minutes to complete. So it's not exactly an efficient system.

While tiny single-paper quadcopter carriers are silly, the concept is nothing new, however. In the U.S., FedEx honchos have been vocal proponents of drone-assisted delivery, for instance. And drones could even be used to deliver food!

If there was a drone that could fly more than 150 feet for more than 20 minutes, maybe the U.S. Postal Service would do something similar. Drones don't care about working on Saturdays, after all.

Even from high above, volcanoes are difficult to study, because they blow out ash and nasty chemicals that can harm airplane engines. But careful monitoring of volcano behavior can improve computer models that explain how they work, and could even predict how they'll behave in the future. To get better data, NASA is sending some military drones into the breach, where the robots can do the dirty work for them.

In March, a team from NASA's Ames Research Center took three electric drones they had obtained from the U.S. Marine Corps and traveled to Costa Rica. The team wanted to study the Turrialba volcano, which has a continuously erupting plume belching out carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, water vapor and some other materials. The plume stretches up to 11,000 feet above sea level, and has relatively low wind shear and updraft, so it's a nice compact plume to study.

The drones were Dragon Eye UAVs, built by drone-maker Aerovironment for military use. They use electric engines, so there was no concern about ash or other harmful materials interfering with their engines.

The drones flew through the toxic plume up to 12,500 feet above sea level, which is more than 2,000 feet above the summit of Turrialba's crater, according to NASA. There, they sniffed out ash concentrations and gas levels. New computer models from these brave drones will improve climate models and help researchers understand "vog," which is like smog, but around volcanoes.

Research like this can help scientists sample massive volcano plumes, like the one that spewed from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010, crippling air traffic.

Click here to enter the gallery

Doctoring photographs is a great April Fools' Day prank, but for some dictatorships it's a way of life.

In modern times, the best government photoshop jobs have been Iranian and North Korean. (No, Iran, you can't just copy-paste extra missiles into a photo.) Here are six of the most ridiculously fake images from the past few years.

STAR-48

The fastest chemical rocket ever, the Star-48 engine was built to launch satellites and was recently incorporated into the New Horizons probe, which took off in 2006. Powered by burning a mixture of ammonium perchlorate and aluminum, it boosted the Pluto-bound probe to approximately 36,000 miles per hour. New Horizons should reach Pluto and its moons by July 2015.
First Used For Propulsion 1980

ION THRUSTERS

Ion thrusters rely on electromagnetic effects to accelerate charged particles out the back of a spacecraft, generating propulsive force. Up to 50 times as efficient as chemical rockets, they are now primarily used for satellite station-keeping. NASA's Deep Space 1, launched in 1998, was the first probe to use an ion engine for main propulsion. Dawn, which is currently exploring the asteroid belt, also uses one.
First Used For Propulsion 1998

SOLAR SAILS

Like regular sails that gather momentum from wind, solar sails rely on the momentum of sunlight. Only a handful have been tested in space so far, including the Japanese Ikaros, a private effort called LightSail, and NASA's NanoSail-D. Scientists are working on creating lighter materials and more reliable deployment methods, both of which could boost speeds.
First Interplanetary Flight 2010

EXTERNAL PULSED PLASMA PROPULSION

Probably the fastest propulsion system scientists could build right now, external pulsed plasma propulsion would explode hundreds of nuclear weapons behind a spacecraft. The ship would ride in front of the shock waves. The idea was first studied in the late 1940s, and, technically, it could work. But implementing it is tricky: Launching a spaceship loaded with hundreds of nuclear weapons is far from safe.
Concept Tested 1957

FUSION ROCKETS

Much like a regular rocket with a more efficient heat source, fusion rockets would heat fuel and shoot it out the back. Scientists have been toying with the idea since the British Interplanetary Society's Daedalus study in the 1970s. Recently, scientists in Project Icarus, an update of Daedalus, reimagined the fusion rocket with more modern techniques. But until researchers get fusion to work well on Earth, the rockets remain far-fetched.
Projected Readiness Date 2030

WARP DRIVE

The only technology that would, in principle, cross the otherwise sacrosanct barrier of light speed, warp drive would use large amounts of negative energy to create a bubble in space-time. It would contract space-time in front of a craft and expand it behind. Instead of traveling through space, a warp-enabled craft would, in a sense, travel on space, riding the space-time deformations.
Projected Readiness Date TBD

Read the Popular Science profile of NASA engineer Harold "Sonny" White and his research into warp drives here, from the April 2013 issue of the magazine.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on making dexterous robot hands to search for explosive devices, use tools, provide amputees with helpful replacements, and maybe even change tires… but don't get too excited about that one, yet.

The New York Times gave an overview of DARPA's work into robot hands a few days ago, including a video of a robot that used a tool to take the nuts off of a tire, took the tire off of its bolts, and then put a new tire onto the bolts. Screwing the nuts back onto the bolts is still too difficult for the robot, but the robot's developers are working on it, DARPA program manager Gill Pratt told the Times.

In general, the project has gotten to the point where its robots are great at visually recognizing and grabbing things like balls and rocks and tools, such as hammers. Sandia National Laboratories and the Massachusetts company iRobot have also worked to make the hands cheaper by reapportioning cellphone cameras and sensors for the hands. A hand could now cost less than $3,000, if made in quantities of 1,000 or greater. That's already an improvement from last August, when Sandia announced it had made a grasping hand that cost $10,000.

Now the challenge is to get the hands to turn nuts and otherwise manipulate tools instead of just holding them. For example, the U.S. military wants robot hands that are able to unzip a suspicious piece of luggage and feel around for improvised explosive devices.

The military is also interested in shunting its research over to labs that develop prosthetic arms and hands for amputees.

[New York Times]

Climate change is expanding sea ice in Antarctica, a paradoxical finding that appears to be the result of melting glaciers, according to a new study. As freshwater glaciers melt, cold water sinks into the ocean, keeping the sea colder than it would otherwise be.

The fresh water is less dense than seawater, so it floats on the top layer of the ocean, which in turn stays cooler. That makes it easier for the seas to freeze again in the Antarctic fall and winter, scientists say. This negative feedback is expected to continue, they added.

Sea ice levels in Antarctica are a major part of ongoing climate change research. Scientists have been puzzled as to why sea ice cover is rising in the southern ocean, while ice in the rest of the world is clearly melting. This study sheds some light on the question.

Richard Bintanja and colleagues at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute used a climate model to show how sea ice expands during fall and winter in the southern hemisphere (our spring and summer). Along with insulating the seas and safeguarding sea ice, this cool, fresh surface layer could also reduce snowfall on the frozen continent. That's because cold air can hold less moisture than warm air; a cool layer would be less likely to be sucked out of the ocean to fall again as precipitation.

There is an alternative explanation for Antarctica's growing sea ice: It could be the result of changing wind patterns, as the BBC notes. But that, too, is a result of changing climate patterns.

The findings appear this week in Nature Geoscience.

It's not easy to see what's going on in a handful of dirt, so some labs use gels and other substitutes to grow plants when they study them. Unfortunately, roots and most of the organisms that interact with them don't grow as well in fakes. That's why researchers at Scotland's nonprofit James Hutton Institute have developed a transparent soil that more closely resembles the real deal. For the main ingredient, they use small particles of the polymer Nafion, which holds nutrients and becomes clear when mixed with water. With the transparent soil, scientists will be able to observe how roots grow, take up nutrients, and associate with microbes without having to destroy the setup. Using the soil, the researchers have already tagged E. coli with a fluorescent marker and became the first to watch it infect lettuce roots, which can then go on to cause illness in people.