The Fernicola brothers, Nick and Frank, grew up in the dirt cowboy subculture of the New Jersey waste industry. Their father, also named Nicholas (his son always went by "Nick" to distinguish them), operated a drum reconditioning business starting in the 1940s on Avenue L in the Ironbound section of Newark, across the street from a slaughterhouse. Even by the standards of that heavily industrialized neighborhood, it was an extraordinarily filthy way to make a living. Nicholas Fernicola specialized in cleaning, repainting, and reselling the 55-gallon steel drums that carried the foulest dregs North Jersey manufacturers could produce. There was no better place than Newark to be in that line of work. It was the "drum capital of the world," as Frank Fernicola would wistfully describe it years later.

The big money, though, came not from refurbishing waste drums but from making them disappear. Back in the 1960s, when the chemical industry was roaring in North Jersey, the forests and farms in the central part of the state were the equivalent of Sutter's Mill in 1849 California. The rush was not to pull gold out of the ground but to dump chemical waste into it. Up in Newark, the landfills were expensive and so crowded that the lines of trucks waiting to unload their drums would stretch for blocks. A generation earlier, Ciba had found space and privacy in the deep woods of Ocean County to manufacture dyes and plastics on a massive scale. Now the chemical-waste haulers from Newark, Elizabeth, and Perth Amboy started to follow suit, pointing their big rigs south on Route 9 in search of cheaper dumping grounds. (The Garden State Parkway would have been faster, but trucks were banned north of Toms River.) They found plenty of willing partners among the farmers of Monmouth, Burlington, and Ocean counties. The real estate boom had not yet reached into the rural inland areas of the state, and chickens could not compete with hazardous waste as a cash crop, since farmers typically were paid anywhere from $20 to $50 per drum of waste dumped on their land.

The big money came from from making waste drums disappear.One of the more enterprising landowners was a man named Edward Wilson, who worked for Morton International in the 1950s and 1960s, when the salt maker was broadening its business to encompass chemical manufacture. Wilson offered his family farm in Ocean County's Plumsted Township as a dumpsite for Morton's toxic wastes, which included halogenated solvents, chlorinated compounds, volatile organics, and heavy metals. His neighbor, Dayton Hopkins, was even more eager: He let Morton dump on three of his farms, including his family's own 57-acre homestead. At the worst of those sites, called Goose Farm, drums were tossed into a pit that was 300 feet long and 100 wide.

Most of the rural townships also operated small municipal landfills--back then, people called them dumps--which were also popular destinations for industrial waste from out of town because they charged less and had much shorter lines than their counterparts to the north. The town governments were just as eager as individual farmers to open their gates to the 18-wheelers from Newark. If the dumps were not burying waste, they were burning it; on Fridays, the usual burn day, the trails of black smoke would billow for miles. Taking in industrial waste from out of town served everyone's short-term interest. Farmers and rural townships got much-needed cash, while haulers and chemical companies got cheap and secluded dumping grounds where no one asked too many questions about what was in the drums. If anyone was worried about the longer-term environmental consequences, there is no evidence of it. A generation later, when investigators finally assessed the damage, they identified two dozen major hazardous waste sites in Ocean County alone, including seven farms and three town dumps. Cleaning them all up would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

As easy as it was to dump legally in the hinterlands of central Jersey, many haulers wanted even sweeter deals. They preferred to do their dumping for free, deep in the pinelands, without anyone's permission or knowledge. No one stood in their way. In those days, the closest thing New Jersey had to an anti-dumping law was a misdemeanor public nuisance statute; it was invoked very rarely and only in the most blatant cases. The Ocean County Prosecutor's Office did not begin going after dumpers until 1980, when an investigator named Dane Wells started trying to track them down. It was harder than it looked. According to Wells, the "midnight dumpers" (though they sometimes operated in broad daylight) would use "horseshoe roads" in the woods, narrow dirt paths with only one entrance and exit. "That way, they could just bring the 18-wheelers in and not have to turn them around after they dumped the drums. Or, if it was liquid, they would just open the spigot and let it run out," he explained years later. The more advanced operations, the ones with links to the organized crime families influential in the North Jersey hauling industry, would post lookouts with walkie-talkies.

Frank Fernicola followed his father into the drum business, working first in Newark and then Toms River, where his clients included Toms River Chemical. He also did some waste trucking but had to give up his hauling permit after he was convicted in the late 1960s of illegally dumping chemical drums at the old Manchester Township landfill, about ten miles west of Toms River. Frank even made a brief foray into the incineration business: He hauled sodium waste from a North Jersey chemical plant to Beachwood, just south of Toms River, and burned it in an open pit. That escapade ended with a bang: An explosion summoned a town fire truck, and Frank lost that permit, too.

Nick Fernicola needed a cheap place to dump all that waste, a place where no one would ask any uncomfortable questions.His older brother Nick, on the other hand, had stayed away from the waste business for years--a high school summer spent working for his dad was more than enough. He was crazy about motorcycles and worked as an auto mechanic before opening a used car salvage and sales business in Newark. In 1966, when he was 31, he followed his brother south to Toms River, running a gas station for a few years and then moving briefly to Idaho. When he returned to Toms River, Nick Fernicola bounced through a series of construction jobs: At various times he drove a front-end loader, laid pipe, and set explosives. All the while, he kept an eye out for a more lucrative opportunity, perhaps even one in the family business. He found it one January night in 1971 at the Rustic Acres, thanks to two guys named Sharkey and Columbo.

The Rustic Acres was a blue-collar landmark in Ocean County until it was finally torn down in the late 1970s. The bar was out on Route 37, midway between the two largest employers in the county: Toms River Chemical and the Lakehurst Naval Air Station. Its wooden tables and stools would fill up at the four o'clock shift change, and again at midnight. Frank Fernicola shot pool at the Rustic Acres five nights a week, sometimes accompanied by his brother Nick. Frank had hauled drums for Union Carbide and had friends who worked at the company's huge chemical plant on the Raritan River, about 60 miles north in the town of Bound Brook. At the time, it was one of the country's largest plastics factories, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic waste. Frank knew that Union Carbide was looking for a hauler to get rid of thousands of deteriorating drums of waste accumulating on the Bound Brook property, and soon his brother knew it, too. To Nick, it sounded like an attractive business opportunity. It sure as hell beat punching a clock as a construction laborer.

To turn a profit, though, Nick Fernicola would need a cheap place to dump all that waste, a place where no one would ask any uncomfortable questions about what was inside the rusty 55-gallon steel drums. Enter Sharkey and Columbo. The two men (Fernicola would later claim to investigators that he never knew their real names) worked at the Dover Township Municipal Landfill, the town dump for Toms River. They were also regulars at the Rustic Acres, and one night Nick Fernicola told them about all those Union Carbide drums that needed a final resting place. The two men agreed to introduce him to the town's superintendent of public works, who ran the landfill. Before long they had a deal: For a bargain-basement price of $10 per truckload, Fernicola could dump the drums in the town landfill on Church Road-but he could dump only at lunchtime, when Sharkey was running the shift, and he had to pay Sharkey directly. Many years later, in a court deposition, Fernicola acknowledged that the payment was not an official fee. When a lawyer asked whether it was a bribe, Fernicola responded, "Could be."

Fernicola drove up to Bound Brook to give Union Carbide the good news: He had found a way to get rid of their drums. In fact, he claimed--falsely, as it turned out--that he had lined up three "authorized land fill areas," according to a document he signed and gave to Union Carbide on February 16, 1971. "My company will handle all removal and disposal of said drums at a rate of $3.50 per drum and will assume all risks and problems arising from such removal and disposal of said drums," he wrote. Fernicola was eager to begin. He would be clearing a hefty profit, since he could dump an entire load of about thirty drums for just $10. He rented three trucks and hired two drivers to help him with the hauling. When Fernicola carried his first load to Toms River on April 1, a low-level manager at Union Carbide followed him to confirm that he was dumping at the town landfill. It would be the last time for eight months that Union Carbide would take an interest in where thousands of its waste-filled drums were going.

Excerpted from Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation Copyright 2013 Dan Fagin. Excerpted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Aiming laser light at the portion of the brain associated with impulse control could ease cocaine addiction, according to a new study in rats.

"When we turn on a laser light in the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex, the compulsive cocaine seeking is gone," researcher Antonello Bonci says in a press release.

It may sound strange--and many experimental treatments that have worked in mice and rats don't work in humans--but scientists are working on the critical next step to find whether this could work for people, too.

Previous research had suggested that that problems in the prefrontal cortex are linked to compulsive drug use, but hadn't demonstrated that they caused drug addiction.

In the new study, researchers from institutions in Maryland and California offered rats levers that, when pressed, would give them infusions of cocaine. After more than eight weeks of the free coke, however, the researchers starting giving the rats a shock in the foot alongside the drug. For some rats, the shock made them reduce their lever-pressing. Others soldiered on, however, in spite of the consequences.

The researchers found that prelimbic cortex neurons in the consequences-be-damned rats were less responsive than the corresponding neurons in shock-fearing rats and in rats who had never had cocaine. The cocaine-taking, shock-fearing rats had some impairments, too, but not as much. These findings showed that cocaine use caused reduced responsiveness in the prelimbic cortex, the researchers wrote in a paper published today in the journal Nature.

The researchers then began stimulating shock-resistant rats' brains with laser light. (Brain cells don't normally fire in response to lasers, but researchers genetically engineered these rats' brains to do so.) The laser treatment reduced how often the rats pressed their cocaine levers.

The same research team is now planning a clinical trial on humans, using a related technique. A search of the National Institutes of Health's ClinicalTrials.gov database reveals that it is one of two apparently active, mid- and early-stage clinical trials of the related technique, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, for cocaine craving and dependence.

Doctors cannot aim lasers in human patients' brains--nor can they genetically engineer us to respond to lasers--so transcranial magnetic stimulation works on the brain using tools placed outside of the scalp that stimulate activity in the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex. Transcranial magnetic stimulation currently used as a treatment for depression that doesn't respond to drugs or therapy, according to the Mayo Clinic.

[University of California - San Francisco]

There have been rumors of a Facebook phone for years. Back in 2011, there even was one, sort of, in the HTC Chacha, a cheap but not bad little phone with an oddly out-of-the-way Facebook-labeled button. But now the rumors are heating up. Tomorrow, Facebook is hosting an event, and the invitation says "Come see our new home on Android."

We don't know what exactly it'll entail, seeing as how Facebook hasn't told us yet. But here's what we're picturing: a Facebook-heavy skin over Android, plus nice new hardware, likely from HTC (makers of probably the best Android phone out there). It'll probably integrate Facebook's services--chatting, messaging, sharing photos and videos and links, keeping up with friends--more centrally than any other phone. Your homescreen won't be a grid of apps; it'll be a stream of updates from Facebook. The Facebook Phone will be "the first truly social phone," according to Facebook. (Take a drink tomorrow if that exact phrase is spoken.) That all seems likely enough.

Google has its own phone, Apple and Microsoft have their own phones, and hell, even Amazon has tablets. Shouldn't Facebook be next?

Well, no, I don't think so.

A Facebook Phone makes sense to Facebook. If Facebook can get your Facebook contacts to be your default contacts, Facebook photo uploads to be your default photo uploads, and Facebook messaging to be your default messaging service, they can serve you lots more ads, and, even better, snag lots of specific information about you to parlay into more valuable ads.

This was Google's strategy, too, with the launch of Android. But Google was in an entirely different position; it entered the market early, just after the iPhone, and Google's services, like Maps, Docs, Gmail, and Contacts, already were your defaults. They didn't have to convince anyone to use Gmail as their primary email service on a phone. Everyone already wanted to use Gmail on a phone. So Google says, hey, use our great services which you already use! And then Google gets lots of data about you in return.

Facebook doesn't have this advantage. Its services aren't dominant in any one area besides as a contacts directory, and what could a Facebook Phone do that's more effective than the way your Facebook contacts are already integrated into your phone? You have to give people a reason to embrace a new platform--"it works well" isn't enough. Everything works well. Gmail works well, so why start using a Facebook email account?

But what about Amazon? Amazon has proved very successful with its Kindle Fire line doing, well, kind of exactly what we think Facebook will: slapping a skin on top of Android and using those gadgets as a way to make cash. Amazon makes cash by getting people to buy stuff, and Facebook makes cash by getting data about people and using it to make more expensive ads, but the principle is the same. Except, it doesn't work quite the same way: Amazon invested in tablets, and Facebook is looking at phones. And those are two very different markets.

Amazon won by offering the first affordable, decent tablet. It could do most of the things an iPad could do--albeit not as well--and cost half the price. That's how tablets work; their pricing is a simple exchange of X currency for Y product. You can win that game on price! But smartphones, not so much.

Smartphone prices are heavily subsidized--they are a complex combination of highly discounted hardware in exchange for contracts in which you pay a higher monthly fee for years. It's not X currency for Y product. You're paying for an item, sure, but in such a drawn-out and opaque way that further discounts don't really have much of an effect. So even offering a device at, say, half the subsidized price of an iPhone wouldn't be a winning strategy for Facebook. People don't snap up cheap-on-contract smartphones the same way they do non-contract items like tablets--just look at the sales failures of the $100 Nokia Lumia 920.

The image above, possibly a leak of tomorrow's device, looks nice enough; it looks like what we expected, a prettified, Facebook-ified Android skin. And that's fine; if the hardware's good enough, if might make for a decent phone. But there's no compelling reason to buy a "Facebook Phone," even if it's nice, over something like an HTC One or even a Samsung Galaxy S4. There's no added draw to stenciling a Facebook logo on a phone.

And people just aren't using Facebook as much. In Facebook's annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company admitted that it was having trouble holding onto younger users. Teens, who made Facebook what it is (and, it should be noted, also made Instagram, Snapchat, and to a lesser extent Twitter what it is), are moving away from Facebook. This is an anecdotal survey, but in concert with the SEC report is telling: teens still use Facebook, but not nearly as much.

"There's a lot of pop-ups on Facebook and ads everywhere, and you see your parents' status updates and older people's things that just aren't funny and you just don't care about them," said a surveyed 17-year-old. Why would she be interested in a phone that makes that her default way of interacting with the digital world?

The New York Times says "Facebook users post more photos, write more status updates and hit the like button more often from mobile devices than they do from computers. So it was almost inevitable that Facebook would introduce a smartphone that put its social network front and center." Inevitable that Facebook would introduce a phone, maybe. But not inevitable that anyone would want one.

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Elisha Otis, inventor of the world's first elevator safety brake, founded the Otis Elevator Company 160 years ago today. The innovative company has not only made skyscrapers (and thus modern cities) possible--it's also brought us conveniences like the first elevator car park and the first computer-controlled elevator. Check out the gallery for nine of the greatest Otis inventions from the Popular Science archives.

A man who spent 42 years in prison walked free yesterday, released because the evidence that he had committed arson was faulty.

Louis C. Taylor had been behind bars since he was 16, after he was convicted of setting a fire in a hotel that killed 29 people. In an agreement with prosecutors, he pled no contest, which means he didn't admit guilt, but he also doesn't contest his charges, which means he can't sue anyone involved in his original prosecution, New York Times reported.

The science of proving arson has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, and Taylor's case isn't the only one to show how previous practices-including outdated practices that continued into recent decades-might have sent innocent people to tragic sentences.

So what was the science of fire before and what's it like now? The New Yorker's reporting on a case that ended in 2004 explained that what were traditionally considered marks of arson actually show up in accidental fires. Things like burn patterns near the floor, V-shaped marks on walls, and glass windows cracked in dense patterns were once considered certain signs of the use of some kind of lighter fluid to induce burning.

In 1990, an experiment done in an abandoned house showed that a fire set on a couch without any accelerating fluid left the same marks. Another study showed that nearly all so-called fire experts tested didn't correctly identify where a test fire started.

The identification of arson was once considered more of an "art" than a science. Arson investigators required little training for their jobs and resisted new evidence in their field, the New Yorker reported.

In Taylor's case, the Arizona Justice Project asked modern fire investigator John Lantini to look through the evidence that Taylor's original prosecutors had compiled. Lantini found that it was impossible to determine how the hotel fire started, so there was no basis for an arson charge.

County Prosecutor Barbara LaWall also asked for a review of the evidence from the Tuscan Fire Department. The department came to the same conclusion, CBS' 60 Minutes reported. LaWall told the show that her prosecution would continue based on the idea that arson could not be ruled out.

In 2010, fire expert Gerald Hurst talked with PBS' Frontline about arson science and the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who received the death sentence in 2004. It can be difficult to prove arson in a case, Hurst said. It is still fair to try to convince a jury without scientific evidence of arson, he added. A prosecutor could use evidence that the accused was motivated to kill the people who died in the fire, for example. However, investigators need to recognize when they just can't tell, which can often happen, Lantini told 60 Minutes.

Canadian astronaut and expedition commander Chris Hadfield shared this photo from the International Space Station today. He thought it looked like "mouthwatering generous folds of icing"; to me, it looked more like a slice of walnut-studded cake. It's actually a photo of sand dunes in Saudi Arabia.

3-D printing is the future of the Navy, say Scott Cheney-Peters and Matthew Hipple in the latest issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine.

Onboard a ship, the extreme finitude of the space limits everything--time spent at sea, distance the crew can safely travel, amount of rum that can be kept on board to keep the crew happy. The traditional way around this is having a series of naval bases throughout the world, complete with provisions and redundant stockpiles of many specific spare parts. In Star Trek, this problem is mitigated by replicators, which turn already-available atoms into needed items on demand. It turns out that somewhere between reality and science fiction, 3-D printing offers a solution.

Rather than carrying around spares of every needed part, a ship with a 3-D printer on board could make needed replacement parts on demand. This innovation has vast potential to let ships do more with less. But the potential for shipboard 3-D printing doesn't stop there. The authors go on to discuss printing human tissue, which could literally be a lifesaver, and printers that are able to recycle shipboard waste into new raw materials.

The article notes that as much potential as there is for the Navy and governments as a whole to gain from it, the technology poses real risks. The most fanciful is fear of a hacked 3-D printer creating "a self-destructing weapon or an infiltrating robot," or introducing "exploitable, unnoticeable design flaws."

Interestingly too, the Navy is aware of 3-D gun printing efforts, and sees the technology as a relevant and inevitable security threat. "It is not difficult to imagine the attraction of such a capability for some not-so-nice state and non-state actors," say the authors.

Think the Milky Way is big? It's puny compared to M87, an elliptical galaxy 980,000 light years in diameter. The Milky Way is only 100,000 light years in diameter. Let's not even get into Hercules A, which is 1.5 million light years across.

Astronomer and artist Rhys Taylor has made such comparisons easier and much more fun with his new infographics ("which is what I gather is now the cool term for 'posters,'" he writes) comparing the sizes of different galaxies.

The graphics are well worth exploring. They show the diversity in sizes and shapes of galaxies and offer interesting facts, like that some galaxies emit jets, powered by black holes in their centers. See them in their full glory at Taylor's website.

This cube could detect a biological threat in a sample of blood in less time than it takes to commute home.

Funded by a grant from the National Institute of Health, SpinDx (yes, that's the name the researchers went with) is a liquid-testing lab in a cube. Using cheap disks to collect samples, usually blood but also other bodily fluids or even just water, the SpinDx disks "contain commercially available reagents and antibodies specific to each protein marker" embedded into 64 tiny pores. Using just a pinprick of blood (or tiny sample of whatever fluid is being tested), capillary action seeds the pores on the disk with the sample. The SpinDx cube then spins the disk in a centrifuge, and lets the reagents and antibodies in the pores test for up to 64 toxins, and delivers test results in just 15 minutes.

The faster a threat can be diagnosed, the better hospitals and the CDC will be able to treat patients. And with an effective early response, we are that much safer from zombies. Okay, zombie defense isn't the first goal, but in light of recent stories about lost viruses and new bioweapon risks, the prospect of a quick diagnosis machine is good news.

The device is still in the testing stages, but so far results have been impressive. Saddam Hussein once produced botulism, a poison used in small doses as a beauty product, in bulk for nefarious purposes. The poison also sometimes occurs in poorly canned food, and there are about 145 poisoning cases reported in the United States each year. It's also a difficult disease to test for--current standard practice requires a test on live mice. According to Sandia National Laboratories researcher Greg Sommer, the SpinDx test "vastly outperformed the mouse bioassay in head-to-head tests, and requires absolutely no animal testing."

Which is great, but to take the SpinDx from lab testing to production, researchers will have to clear two hurdles--animal and clinical tests. After that, the scientists believe the SpinDx will be at the forefront of catching new diseases, keeping researchers busy for years to come. And, hopefully, keeping the rest of us safe.

Right now, if doctors want to test you for something, they'll probably draw blood or politely ask you to pee in a cup. Nothing wrong with that, but it'd certainly be convenient if they just asked you to keep breathing instead.

Researchers in Zurich are looking into the process of using "breathprints"--the unique characteristics of a person's breath--to test for illnesses. With a technique known as mass spectrometry, which separates and patterns molecules by measuring their masses, the team mapped 11 volunteers' chemical patterns by having them breath through an instrument attached to the mass spectrometer. Each resulting pattern was unique, and the patterns didn't change much throughout the day.

That's not quite the same as being able to see diseases, though. The researchers still have to determine which patterns are consistent with diseases, which probably means more tests. The team is looking to use the process to test for lung diseases first, since those would be most likely to show up in a breathing test.

The mass spectrometers used in the study are also expensive and weighty, the researchers say, but if the design improves, it could mean better tests for patients. The threshold to perform a breathing test would be much lower than a urine or blood test, since it could send back results in seconds and would be much less invasive. Just breathe.

[Science Daily]

It's cold up there in space, so before the James Webb Space Telescope gets sent up there, NASA scientists are putting it through its paces, locking parts of it in a vacuum and chilling them to -414 F. We've seen what the vacuum looks like, and here we see the telescope's wings coming in for testing. The wings have 900 parts, mostly made from lightweight graphite composite materials, and can unfold from 16.4 feet to 21 feet. The tests will ensure all of those parts work in a controlled setting before the telescope is rocketed away for real.

Scientists estimate that the sea level will rise 9 inches or more by 2030, up to more than 6.6 feet by 2100. In anticipation of a far wetter world, French architecture firm Sitbon Architectes designed this pod concept for a habitable, eco-friendly phytoplankton farm in the Indian Ocean.

Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms that form the foundation of the aquatic food chain. They use chlorophyll to turn sunlight into energy, absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen like land plants. They can have explosive population growth, known as a bloom, expanding over hundreds of square kilometers in the ocean.

Moored to the ocean floor, the farm, called Bloom, would be a 5-story, partially-submerged center where scientists could live and grow phytoplankton, reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and releasing oxygen. In the process, it could serve as an alert system for rising waters in the event of a tsunami. (Though it doesn't look like the best place to actually ride out a tsunami, with its many air holes.)

The project was a finalist in Architizer's 2013 A+ Awards. The firm envisions that "every factory would have its own bloom allowing it to absorb the CO₂ that it created." Plus, it looks like it could involve a lot of fun water sports.

[plusMOOD]

Right now, in California, Facebook is announcing its new phone--or, at least, it's new homescreen. We'll be updating this post live as events happen.

So! What Facebook announced today is called Facebook Home. It's a skin--a homescreen replacement, kind of like what HTC and Motorola and Samsung do with their phones. They take stock Android (which, to be fair, we generally like the most) and overlay with new icons and features and gestures and various user-interface changes. Facebook Home is a particularly thorough skin; most of the other skins are fairly similar to stock Android, but not this.

Turn on your phone, and you won't see a list of apps, or widgets. You'll see Facebook: a new kind of Facebook, but Facebook. You'll swipe through people and updates, photos and messages, all from Facebook. The interface works like Instagram: swipe through to scroll, double-tap to "like." Notifications are embedded in that interface, which is called "CoverFeed." You can swipe them to dismiss or group them any way you like. The notifications are grouped by people rather than by app; you won't see all of your text messages in one place, but you will see an email and an instant message from the same person in one place. Apps are launched from within the CoverFeed too--a simple swipe brings up your most favorite apps.

But the point of this homescreen is, as we expected, to get you to use Facebook services instead of non-Facebook services. Use Facebook Message instead of GChat or SMS. Use Facebook's photo service instead of Flickr or Picasa or iPhoto. The other point: Facebook said that ads will be integrated into the CoverFeed.

If you want to do non-Facebook stuff, you click on a picture of your own face, which is kind of...odd. It's not the last time you'll be poking people in the face; Facebook Home places little thumbnails of your friends' faces over any screen in which you're communicating with them. Tap the face and it'll take you to a unified list of all your communication with that person. That's a nice idea; there's no need for different types of communications (instant messages, text messages, emails) to be sectioned off.

To that end, Facebook also introduced the HTC First, a $99 phone for AT&T, which will come stock with Facebook Home. But you'll be able to download Home for certain--not sure which ones yet--Android phones, starting on April 12th.

A couple of months ago, a colleague asked me if one could grow one's own hops. The answer is an emphatic YES. If you have some space outdoors and something that's tall enough to let the hop plants grow, you can be the proud owner of some homegrown hops.

Hops, as I discussed in an previous column, are a member of the Cannabinaceae family of plants. Hop plants are dioecious, which means that the species has individual male and female plants; for brewing purposes, you only want the female plants, because they're the ones that produce the hop flowers. If you've never seen a hop before, you might not know that the hop plant is a bine -- that's right, bine with a b. Both bines and vines are climbing plants, but whereas vines use tendrils or suckers to hold onto the vertical surface as they grow tall, bines helix their entire stem around the support. You'll want to keep that in mind when you build your hop trellis, and give the bines some room to grow.

The first thing to consider is habitat: hops are what is known as a short-day plant. That is, they only begin to flower when they experience short days and long nights during part of the yearly growing cycle. Hops most optimally grow between 35 and 55 degrees latitude. Those of you who live outside of those latitudes (especially closer to the equator) can still grow hops, but your yields may be crap.

Next, you'll want to find a spot that gets a lot of sun: hops like getting at least 8 and up to 15 hours a day during the summer, so don't hide the plants behind a tree or in a shaded corner of the garden. Hops need good air circulation (to limit chances of mildew) and plenty of water, and they prefer well-aerated soils.

Once you've picked a spot, build your hop trellis. You'll want a structure that's at least 15 feet tall, plus some space to grow horizontally once the bine reaches its full height -- some can grow to more than 25 feet long and weigh more than 20 pounds, so be sure you build a sturdy trellis. Most hop growers build the support structure, then run twine or wire to the ground; the hop bines grow up the wires.

There are so-called "dwarf" or "hedgerow" hop varietals, which have bines about 10 feet long, available as well. The hedgerow varieties are most-often cultivated in UK, but some U.S.-based farmers are also growing them. If you're growing hops in an urban environment, such as on the fire escape, a dwarf plant might best fit your needs. The main downside to dwarf plants is a lower-yield-per-acre (no surprise, that, as shorter bines mean fewer places for flowers to grow).

Hops aren't propagated by seeds. Instead, you buy a rhizome from one of a number of producers or homebrew supply shops. Rhizomes are basically an underground stem; you're probably most familiar with the rhizome ginger root. Rhizomes generate both roots and shoots, which means that once you plant it in the ground, you're pretty much good to go as far as getting a useful plant out of it. Do be sure to plant the rhizome root-side down. Once the shoots poke through the soil, train the best-looking ones around the support (you'll need to train the shoots for a few days before they start winding themselves), and clip off the sorrier-looking ones.

If you're feeling especially leery of starting from bare rhizome, or you want to grow the hops on your fire escape quickly, I've found sprouted hop plants for sale at various sites, such as here, here and here. No word on how much easier and quicker they are to grow than the bare rhizome.

When dreaming of your upcoming hop harvest, be sure to check some of your expectations. The first year you won't get too many hops; the plants need at least a year before they reach peak yield. And you're not going to be harvesting Simcoe or Amarillo, for example, because those varietals are patented and the rhizome is nigh-impossible to buy on the open market. (If you wish to circumvent IP, that's your business--we don't want to hear about it). Instead, pick varietals that are in the public domain, such as Fuggles, Centennial or Cascade. It's something of a pity that winter took so long to leave (I sure as hell wasn't thinking about digging in frozen ground even two weeks ago), as there aren't that many hop rhizomes currently for sale. But a bit of judicious googling will find you some rhizomes up for grabs. If you strike out completely, you might want to use this summer to explore building the hop trellis, then pre-order your rhizomes for delivery next February. Once you have those hops in hand, you'll be one of the lucky few capable of brewing "wet hopped" or "fresh hopped" beers--that is, using hop cones in your brew within a few hours of the plants being harvested.

From nanoparticles to galaxies, we can understand a lot about how our universe works--but it's hard to keep things in context. Can you really grasp how far you'd have to travel to reach Mars? Or wrap your head around the infinitesimally small size of a virus?

A couple of awesome animations will help. The first one, from London-based designers David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams, is an effective way to see just how far away Mars really is. It's shrunk down to a 100-pixel scale. Click here to open the animation.

When you've got Mars down, look at this incredible Flash tool created by Cary and Michael Hwang. It's from last year, and it's the second version of their "Scale of the Universe" animation, but having recently stumbled across it we found it well worth sharing.

You can scroll with a mouse or touchscreen, but I recommend using the slider at the bottom, because then you won't miss any of the lovely animated gifs--from wriggling worms to pulsating Cepheid stars. Click here to open it and enter the Scale of the Universe.

The modern lobotomy originated in the 1930s, when doctors realized that by severing fiber tracts connected to the frontal lobe, they could help patients overcome certain psychiatric problems, such as intractable depression and anxiety. Over the next two decades, the procedure would become simple and popular, completed by poking a sharpened tool above the eyeball. According to one study, about two thirds of patients showed improvement after surgery.

Unfortunately, not all lobotomy practition-ers were responsible, and the technique left some patients with severe side effects, including seizures, lethargy, changes in personality, and incontinence. In response, doctors refined their techniques. They replaced the lobotomy with more specialized approaches: the cingulotomy, the anterior capsulotomy, and the subcaudate tractotomy. Studies of these procedures found evidence of benefit for at least one fourth of patients suffering from problems such as OCD and depression.

Even with the risk of side effects, those in the field still say the procedures were by and large successful. "I feel that the principle behind ablative surgery was somewhat exonerated by the research findings, which showed that it worked for very specific indications," says Konstantin Slavin, president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and professor at the Uni­versity of Illinois at Chicago.

By the 1980s, lobotomies had fallen out of fashion. "In general, the entire functional neurosurgery field moved away from destruction-from ablative surgery," Slavin says. A then-new technique called deep-brain stimulation made ablative surgery obsolete. In the procedure, a surgeon drills holes in the head and inserts electrodes into the neural tissue. When current passes through the leads, they activate or inactivate patches of the brain. "The attractive part is that we don't destroy the tissue," Slavin says. Doctors can also adjust treatment if a patient suffers side effects. They can turn the current down or suspend it altogether-so as to "give the brain a holiday," as Slavin calls it.

Most deep-brain stimulation is now used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson's Disease. The surgical treatment of patients with OCD is FDA-approved but reserved only for extreme cases. Slavin and his colleagues have been examining broader uses in an ongoing study. "Within the next five years, we hope we'll have a definitive answer of whether or not it works."

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

Scientists have been naming species after famous people for a long time. For example, Thomas Jefferson has an extinct giant ground sloth named after him. Mark Knopfler rates a dinosaur. Frank Zappa has multiple animals sharing his namesake, including a spider, a jellyfish and a mudskipper.

Now joining those hallowed ranks is one of the Great Old Ones. Scientists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Florida bequeathed two new genera of symbiotic protists their own dread names: Cthulhu and Cthylla.

The protists, not surprisingly, have a lot of tentacles. (Or, well, they have tentacle-like appendages. In fact, if they didn't have tentacle-like appendages, I would have been writing this column berating the researchers for their oversight). But, as the researchers say in the abstract to their paper, published in PLOS One: "Both genera have […] an anterior bundle flagella (and likely a single posterior flagellum) that emerge slightly subanteriorly and have a distinctive beat pattern. Cthulhu is relatively large and has a distinctive bundle of over 20 flagella whereas Cthylla is smaller, has only 5 anterior flagella."

The critters live inside termite guts and help the termites digest the cellulose in wood. I had no idea that R'lyeh was situated in the body cavity of an insect, rather than at the bottom of the South Pacific.

The Lovecraftian purists out there are probably looking at the second genus and muttering "bullsh*t" to themselves--Cthylla (apparently Cthulhu's youngest progeny) was not created by H.P. Lovecraft. She was invented in 1975 by writer Brian Lumley. I'm not going to get into a nerd-rage fueled throwdown over the nomenclature and rightness of using a latter-day addition to the mythos in the same paper as the hallowed original. I'm just going to use this as an excuse to bust out my copy of At The Mountains of Madness and call in sick tomorrow for work.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

A military sensor with a movie villain name is helping law enforcement agents nab people trying to enter the United States illegally.

The frighteningly named VADER, for "Vehicle And Dismount Exploitation Radar" was first put to use tracking insurgents over a wide area in Afghanistan. With the war winding down, VADER has come home, joined the border patrol, hooked up with a Predator drone, and gone looking for people illegally crossing the United States-Mexico border.

What VADER found was remarkable. Over a three-month stretch, VADER helped "find and detain 1,874 people in the Sonora Desert." The radar detected an additional 1,962 people that Border Patrol couldn't catch. While earlier congressional investigative estimates had put the border patrol's success rate at 64 percent, VADER reveals that the total number of crossings is much greater (and therefore the success rate actually lower).

There are limitations to this--in an area full of cars or people, VADER's powers of detection are overwhelmed by the ease with which potential suspects can blend into the surroundings. That means that VADER is probably useless in most cities, towns, and popular border crossings. (Which is fine, because those places already have people on the ground who can do the job better.) For wide swaths of empty desert, like Southern Arizona where VADER was tested, the radar's sensors work very well.

Border Patrol is so impressed by the technology that officials are requesting two more VADERs. In addition to assisting in patrol work, VADER will serve a broader purpose: providing a more complete picture of border crossings. Better data could help Congress make more informed decisions about immigration policy (thoughIwouldn'tholdyourbreath).