We've had a good time with the Necomimi Cat Ears in the past--we used them to monitor our interest in the last iPhone event--but the Good Times project is a use for them we never expected.

The Necomimi Cat Ears, upon which the Good Times project is based, use electroencephalography to monitor brainwave activity. The Cat Ears are a pretty simple cause-and-effect toy: with high levels of brain activity, the ears perk up. With low activity, they droop down. They're fun, but we couldn't see much real practical use for them.

Good Times uses essentially a pair of the Necomimis without the ears attached, and uses the brainwave monitoring to trigger a specific response when people try to call you. When your brainwave activity is very high, the device assumes you're mentally very engaged, working hard on something, and thus do not want to be disturbed. If anyone tries to call during that time, he or she will get your voicemail, which the headset has activated via Bluetooth. Once your brainwave activity has lessened, people will be able to get through again.

I saw the Good Times demonstrated at an AT&T event this morning, and it worked quite well. I'm normally skeptical of EEG, having had experiences with it where it just doesn't work, but Good Times seems to work perfectly. It does, however, look completely ridiculous. That's not really a problem, considering this is more of a fun experiment than a product that's designed to be sold on the retail market. But it's fun!

Good Times was created at an AT&T hackathon, out of a modified Necomimi set. It's the product of one man, Italian native Ruggero Scorcioni, who took first place (and a $30,000 prize) for Good Times.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. The scientists of 1939 would like to add "moon explosion" and "giant meteor" to that list-and they created some terrifying paintings to show you just what humanity's demise will look like. Popular Science published those apocalyptic illustrations, along with a very upsetting three-page article, in its September 1939 issue.

In the image above, thousands of people run from Manhattan as meteors streak down around them. But their flight is futile, because a city-sized asteroid is about one nanosecond away from obliterating the Eastern time zone. "People that it missed would still be threatened, not only by terrible earthquakes, but even more by a searing air blast of hurricane velocity that would mushroom out from the point of impact," Popular Science explains.

Read on for more vintage terror.

Look at those stylish men and women, fanning themselves on the beach as a metropolis burns to ash in the distance. Do they know they are about to die?

This lonely, icy scene takes place not at one of Earth's frozen poles, but at its equator. The sun is dying, slowly, and so are the four humans in this painting.

If Earth manages to avoid a sun-burst, sun-death, and giant meteors, it will be our own moon that finally does us in.

Finally, Popular Science explains, the moon will get so close to Earth that it will experience "land tides," causing our satellite to burst into rocky chunks that then rain down on Earth, "completing the destruction of anything alive." The rest of the moon pieces will orbit around Earth in a ring, and our planet will live out its days like a grotesque version of Saturn.

Whew! Glad that's over. Read the full story in the September 1939 issue of Popular Science.

If you consider how many things have to go right for it to work, passenger flight is a seamless experience almost all of the time. Except when it isn't, and your flight is delayed and you miss your connection. Why does this happen? It's actually a tough challenge, and airlines hate it almost as much as you do. Missed connections and annoyance cause pollution and frustration, costing airlines (and passengers) plenty of money.

Arrival times are hard to predict because there are tons of variables to consider. Wind speed, weather, air speed and others can all conspire to create dramatic differences in an expected arrival time and when your pilot actually parks at the gate. Even a one-minute reduction in departure delays could save $1.2 million in crew costs and $5 million in fuel, according to airplane engine-maker GE.

To improve these predictions, GE teamed up with Alaska Airlines and the crowdsourcing challenge company Kaggle, asking data nerds to crunch numbers and find an algorithm for predicting arrival times. The winners of the first round of Flight Quest, announced today, used some mathematical models to come up with new prediction methods. Their error rates--just a few minutes' difference--are a 40 percent improvement over the industry standard, according to GE.

Singapore-based Team Gxav &* used a mixture of gradient boosting and random forest models, according to GE. Their average errors were 4.2 and 3.2 minutes for gate and runway arrivals, respectively. Developers and data scientists from 58 countries submitted more than 3,000 ideas competing for a pool of $600,000--and some of them have hardly set foot on an airplane. You can read more about the winners, and the next round of the competition, here.

[GE]

About 2 million people in the United States can't smell anything. That's got to be great if, say, you're walking past a dumpster, but not-so-great if you're looking for love. Research suggests that men who can't smell have fewer sex partners than men with fully functioning nostrils. About five times fewer.

A team of researchers had already found a correlation between not having a sense of smell and having feelings of insecurity. (There are a few possibilities about why: either we can't check ourselves for odor or we take comfort from certain smells.) A more recent study from the same researchers compared 32 people who couldn't smell--22 women and 10 men--with a control group, asking both groups about the number of sexual partners they'd had. The question was, if people are insecure because they can't smell, will that insecurity affect their sex lives, too?

Well, something's affecting their sex lives. The men, on average, had way fewer partners than the men in the control group. Curiously, the women without a sense of smell had about the same number of partners as the control group women. But compared with the control group (and the men), the women ranked themselves as more insecure in their current romantic relationship.

So what's going on here? Why didn't men and women react to their own inability to smell the same way? Good question! And it's hard to say, as Research Digest points out.

Here are a few theories on why the results came out the way they did.

• While women without a sense of smell seemed to lack confidence in relationships, according to the study, the men apparently lacked social confidence. That might make them more timid in social situations, and explain the below-typical number of sex partners. (Although that's discounting the opposite: that these men are more secure in their relationships. In fact, men in the study rated their relationship security slightly higher than the male control group did.)
• There's evidence that a specific smell may be more heavily associated with a relationship for women than it is for men. That would explain why lacking a sense of smell would coorelate more with women feeling insecure in a relationship than men.
• It's important to remember, and even the researchers admit, that this was a study with a very small sample size. It's entirely possible that a larger group would show different results.

But the results here are a little sad. Don't be self-conscious, non-smellers of either gender. There could be a silver lining.

[Research Digest]

Click here to enter the gallery

If you've ever wondered how boneless chicken parts end up that way, take a peek inside one of the 4,000 or so poultry processing plants in the U.S. Workers man massive assembly lines to scald, pluck, gut, slice, and wrap an estimated nine billion birds annually.

Unsurprisingly, work in poultry plants is dirty and dangerous. The job of chicken deboner (who cuts through the shoulder joint to separate the wing from the body) is particularly brutal since it requires performing repetitive motions with a knife for hours on end in a room the temperature of a refrigerator. If ever there was a job for a robot, this is it. But teaching a machine to carve poultry is difficult. No two chickens are the same, and each cut must be perfect. If a robot splinters a bone, it contaminates the meat. If it leaves too much flesh behind, it costs its owner money.

Later this year, a team from the Geor­gia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta will put the finishing touches on an autonomous robotic chicken butcher. The Intelligent Deboning System, a one-armed knife-wielding automaton, has the brains and dexterity to debone a bird in four seconds flat, on par with a human butcher. 

DISASSEMBLY LINE

1) Queue
Gutted whole chickens sit on metal cones as they travel along a conveyor belt, just as they would in a conventional poultry factory.

2) Assess
Each chicken passes through a kind of photo booth. Inside, two pairs of stereo cameras scan the bird, one pair per side. A computer instantly renders the images into a 3-D map of the bird. It also identifies useful markers, such as the humerus and the coracoid bones.

3) Calculate(Not shown in illustration)
In a production model that the Georgia Tech researchers plan to build, two robotic arms work on opposite sides of the conveyor belt-one arm for each side of the bird. Equipped with a 3-D map of the incoming chicken, the robots calculate a cutting trajectory accurate to within three millimeters. Fortunately, the body proportions of a chicken adhere to quantifiable standards. So by calculating the dimensions of one body region the machines can deduce the dimensions of all the other body parts.

4) Slice
To remove the wings from the breast meat, the robotic arms slice into the chicken with a knife at the collarbone, move toward the shoulder, cut through the shoulder joint, and continue down the bird's backside along the shoulder blade, all in two seconds.

5) Repeat
Nine billion times a year.

THE BUTCHER

Knife Arm
The business end of the robot is an industrial arm similar to those used to weld and paint car parts. The prototype features six degrees of freedom (one less than a human arm) to make cuts as fluid and graceful as possible.

Force Feedback
A force-torque sensor on the tip of the knife imparts sensitivity to the blade. Because the arm can sense resistance, it can move the blade along the surface of the bone without slicing through it and can discern between meat, tendons, and ligaments. "The big challenge is teaching the robot to adjust its behavior in real time to account for all the variation in different birds," says Ai-Ping Hu, senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Force feedback is key to accomplishing this. Dull blade? The sensor knows that too and signals the robot to sharpen it.

Brain(Not shown in illustration)
To help the robot calculate the cutting path, algorithms compare 3-D maps of each chicken to a database of dozens of different body types. The machine also learns on the fly and gets smarter with each new chicken it carves.

STATS

Calculations per Second to Render a Map of the Bird: 1,000
Seconds it Takes to Calculate a Cut: 0.5
Seconds to Debone an Individual Bird: 2-4
Estimated Cost of Each Robot Butcher: $350,000
Pounds of Chicken Consumed per Capita in the U.S. Each Year: 84

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

Salim Nasser never thought he'd reinvent the wheel. But he's done it, in a sense, for wheelchairs.

Nasser, a NASA engineer, inventor and quadriplegic, has created a wheel that could dramatically reduce how much energy a wheelchair user expends moving his or her chair forward. Now Rowheels, the company he cofounded in 2012, hopes to bring the wheel to market later this year. If successful, it should mean more efficient mobility and healthier bodies for users, Nasser says.

Standard manual wheelchairs require users to grasp and push a rim that extends from the chair's back wheels. It's a decent enough method for self-propulsion, but it taxes small, weak muscles in the shoulders and arms and can lead to repetitive stress injuries.

Nasser's wheel helps target bigger muscles. How it works: Using a mechanical device called a planetary gear, Nasser redesigned the wheel hub so that users pull it backwards in a rowing motion to go forward. Planetary gears are used in automatic transmissions and power tools to reverse and reduce motion, but no wheelchair wheels on the market currently use this design, Nasser says.

Jackie Justus, a spinal cord nursing educator at Zablocki Veterans Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee, says a rowing motion for wheelchair users would be a "big step forward and save them a lot of wear and tear." She has been working independently for the past two years with an engineering team to redesign the wheelchair.

Pulling, she says, uses larger stronger muscle groups, while pushing a wheelchair uses little muscles in the front of the body and also hunches over the upper body. The rowing motion makes wheelchair users sit up straight, she says, allowing the diaphragm to function properly and significantly improve breathing.

Nasser is a native of Colombia who now lives near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. His day job is designing and analyzing equipment for mobile launchers used to assist space shuttles. He led a relatively normal life until age 20 when a drunk ran a stop sign and smashed into Nasser's car. "Three vertebrae were broken and I was paralyzed from the chest down," Nasser says. "Initially, I couldn't move anything."

After the accident, he moved to Miami to recover. "Within a year, I regained a bit of shoulder and arm strength, but it was a slow process," he says.

Four years later, he'd gained enough confidence to apply at Florida International University in Miami. He was accepted and excelled, earning his undergraduate and master's degrees in mechanical engineering over the next 5.5 years. During several summers, he was an intern at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. />

An inventor at heart, Nasser began working on a new kind of wheelchair wheel in college. "It was an idea for a senior design project nearly seven years ago," Nasser says. "I came up with the idea and worked on it with a group to refine it and build the prototype. Then it just sat there."

In 2010, Nasser dusted off his plan and entered a NASA Tech Briefs "Create the Future" competition.

"I redesigned it to be more ergonomic and lighter," Nasser says. "And much to my surprise, I won. I'd always wanted to make something out of it, but I wasn't doing anything with the idea."

Following his win, he began getting calls from companies that wanted to manufacture his wheel. But nothing clicked.

Then, while checking his spam folder in October of 2011, he noticed a message from Rimas Buinevicius, an entrepreneur in Madison, Wisconsin.

Buinevicius, who led a software company called Sonic Foundry for nearly two decades, had spent eight weeks in a manual wheelchair after breaking a leg. During that time, he said his shoulders and arms hurt from pushing his manual wheelchair wheels forward.

"When I read about what Salim had invented, I wanted to contact him because I knew--from my own experience--that there was a need for a better wheelchair wheel design," says Buinevicius, who runs "Madcelreator," a company that helps early stage firms bring their ideas to market.

"I was initially looking at trying to buy a set of these wheels as a consumer," Buinevicius says. Then he realized he could do a lot more with Nasser's idea.

"I figured it could help a lot of people--some 1.8 million folks use manual wheelchairs in the U.S.--so there's a big market out there for these wheels," Buinevicius says. "Over time, damage to shoulders means a lot of pain and ending up in a motorized chair, which most people want to avoid."

Though wheelchairs have evolved over the decades--and racing wheelchairs can look like a bit like sleek motorcycles--wheel technology hasn't changed much since it was designed more than 100 years ago, he said. />

After talking with Buenevicius, Nasser says he "got quite excited and redesigned the wheel completely to further reduce the likelihood of people suffering from repetitive stress syndrome while using the wheel.

"I figured out that if a typical user pushes 2,000 to 3,000 times a day, on average, my redesign came out to 330,050 less strokes a year," Nasser says.

Buinevicius--who is now the chief executive officer at Rowheels--flew to Florida. The pair hit it off and cofounded Rowheels in 2012. Next, as Nasser continued to improve the wheel design, they entered and won the Grand Prize in the Wisconsin Governor's Business Plan Contest in June of 2012.

Recently, Rowheels showed off the beta design of the wheel at MedTrade, a big medical conference in Atlanta; and the International Seating Symposium in Nashville. Nasser is also working with Georgia Tech's RERC/Wheeled Mobility lab and the Shepherd Center, a hospital in Atlanta that specializes in treatment, research and rehabilitation of people with spinal cord and brain injuries, to improve the wheels. Though the cost hasn't been determined yet, Buinevicius estimated that a set of wheels will cost between $2,000 and $3,000.

"We vetted the product last month with over 100 researchers, therapists and end users in Nashville," Buinevicius says. "There, the attendees were able to try the product firsthand and we received very favorable responses. We are still doing our own internal testing and using select groups of users. Independent tests will start soon." If all goes well, Buinevicius says they hope Rowheels will be on the market by later this year, "using a combination of third party manufacturers, suppliers and our own people to manufacture and distribute the product."

You probably have a sketchy idea of tax havens--the pillowcases of the super-rich--but might not have an idea of exactly the steps necessary to avoid getting taxed by the government. But a recent financial data leak has given us a window into the process, and this CBC News infographic breaks it down amazingly.

Walk through the slides and you'll stash your cash where it can't be traced, set up a fake company, move the money, hide the money through investments, and finally spend it. (Or turn yourself in--as if you were considering that.)

Yes, it'll make you frustrated that people with millions of dollars can make even more millions by skirting tax law. But this infographic also makes it fun to do yourself.

[CBC News]

A federal judge ruled today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must make emergency contraception-often called the "morning after pill" or by its brand name, "Plan B"-available over-the-counter for girls and women of all ages. The administration must comply within 30 days, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Federal District Court said.

Previously, women over the age of 17 could legally get Plan B and its generic counterparts over-the-counter, but younger girls needed a prescription. The history of getting this approval is a fascinating-and long-case of politics versus science.

The science at stake is actually pretty simple. Biologically, the medication works in the same way, and is safe, for women and girls of all ages. The important questions for younger girls included: Do girls under 17 understand how to use Plan B properly, without the help of a doctor? Do they know that it's not designed for use as a routine contraception? That it won't protect them against sexually transmitted diseases?

Major medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstericians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have long recommended over-the-counter Plan B access for all ages. In 2011, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg issued a statement saying that FDA scientists found that girls under 17 are able to safely use Plan B without a doctor's guidance.

Hamburg was overruled, however, by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who said the FDA data didn't include girls as young as 11, some of whom are able to get pregnant. The overruling was a historic first, the New York Times reported.

In a memo about his decision, Korman wrote that the number of 11-year-olds requesting Plan B will likely be miniscule and that Sebelius' reasoning was "an excuse to deprive the overwhelming majority of women of their right to obtain contraceptives without unjustified and burdensome restrictions." The FDA has approved other drugs for over-the-counter sale that are dangerous for kids, he wrote.

This isn't the first time a federal court has considered this issue. In 2005, Korman oversaw a similar case. At that time, he said the FDA allowed political pressure from the Bush Administration to get in the way of its usual policy. He still left the ultimate decision up to the agency, however. "It was my view that the decision whether to make Plan B available without a prescription regardless of age was one that should be made by the FDA, to which Congress had entrusted the responsibility, and not by a federal district judge," he wrote in today's memo.

It appears Korman changed his mind because the FDA was taking too long to do anything. He called the FDA's actions an "administrative agency filibuster."

The ruling covers a lot more interesting science. Korman wrote about how plan B works and whether it interferes with the ability of a fertilized embryo to attach the uterine wall and survive after fertilization. (There is no evidence Plan B prevents implantation, but it is also infeasible to conduct the studies that would rule out the possibility.)

He also looked at a study about the effects of making Plan B a prescription medication for some. The study found that the laws made Plan B more difficult to get for everyone, even for women over 17, who were previously legally allowed to buy Plan B over-the-counter. Many pharmacies incorrectly told researchers posing as 17-year-olds that they weren't allowed to buy Plan B.

With just an fMRI, an algorithm, and the internet, researchers from Kyoto, Japan predicted with 60 percent accuracy what a person was dreaming about, Smithsonian magazine reports. The idea, like the process, isn't all that complicated: Our brains react measurably differently to different stimuli: looking at a book or a building doesn't cause the same reaction. So the Kyoto team had three people sleep in an fMRI for three-hour stints over 10 days, and hooked them up to an EEG, which used electrical signals from the body to track which stage of sleep the were in were in.

Early on, just a few minutes after falling asleep, dreams started coming in bursts. The scientists woke the subjects up soon after and asked them what they saw. (For each participant, they actually did that 200 times, presumably turning them into the Grumpiest People In The Universe.) The researchers wrote down the 20 most common things the subjects saw: people, buildings, etc. They then found images on the internet that matched those common things, showed them to the subjects while they were awake but still in the fMRI, and took a reading. That information was fed into a learning algorithm. When the subjects slept again, the algorithm spit back this '80s music video-like representation of what the sleepers saw.

The biggest words at the bottom are the algorithm's predictions of what the dreamer is seeing. When the researchers woke up the subjects again and asked what they saw, the algorithm was right 60 percent of the time. It was better at distinguishing between, say, a scene, like a street, and a person, but it couldn't guess specifically if the "scene" was of a building or something else. Still, 60 percent, even though it might not be high enough to do much other research with, is unexplainable by chance.

In 2011, we reported on a study from another team that's reminiscent of this one. The researchers in that study pulled off a similar trick by scanning subjects' (awake) brains to reconstruct a video clip they'd watched. (We took an even deeper look at the process, actually, back in 2010.) This study is similar, but the researchers say it's the first time the contents of a dream have been plucked from a sleeper's head. So even if the team was only able to do it with a relatively low 60 percent accuracy, the technique is probably just going to get better from here.

[Smithsonian]

Lifeguards of the future may soon come with four rotors.

RTS Labs, an Iranian research firm, has started work on a drone lifeguard. Tired of hearing stories about people drowning in the Caspian Sea, the researchers sought out a way to improve water rescue. Drones can help in several ways humans can't--they can move faster over choppy seas, they always remain calm, and a drone will never fall asleep on the job. Iran has an usually high rate of unintentional drownings compared with European countries. A robot that helps lifeguards save lives faster could presumably lower that rate.

The Pars Aerial Rescue Robot is designed to work as a mobile lifesaver dispensary, flying out to those in need and dropping vital flotation aids until better help can be secured. As currently designed, Pars starts with a quadrotor, which makes sense: quadrotors are versatile platforms, beloved by scientists because the machines can do things like test eagle arms and kinect-based navigation. Quadrotors are also a relatively strong. That means Pars wouldn't have any trouble carrying life preservers as well as a sophisticated navigation software and infrared cameras.

In its current iteration, Pars carries up to three life preservers; in future iterations, it could carry as many as 15, the researchers say. To fit that many life preservers on a drone without the whole thing looking like a precarious stack of Oreos, researchers want Pars to carry self-inflating life preservers that use chemical materials to bloat. Pars would also be able to land on water and float until a rescue vessel picks it up.

Research and development for Pars is in the very early stages, but the promise is there. After news emerged that Iran's fancy new vertical takeoff and landing drone was nothing more than a bad Photoshop job, it would be great if the most popular drone out of Iran were one that saves lives.

Activists and aid workers who document government abuses or monitor elections often risk abduction by those who oppose their work. Now one organization has developed a gadget to help.

Stockholm-based Civil Rights Defenders is distributing a bracelet that sends out "Help!" messages when its wearer activates it, or if someone pulls the bracelet off its wearer forcefully, the BBC reported. The bracelet has a GPS tracker and will send information about the wearer's identity and location to nearby workers who could come to the rescue. The Civil Rights Defenders headquarters also gets a notice.

At the same time, the bracelet posts messages to Twitter and Facebook, which Civil Rights Defenders says will make repressive regimes warier of garnering international condemnation for kidnapping activists.

The advocacy group hopes to give out 55 bracelets within the next year and a half.

Civil Rights Defenders says the bracelet was inspired by the case of Natalia Estemirova. Estemirova documented human rights abuses in Chechnya in the northern Caucaus region. In 2009, she was abducted and shot in the head.

Interested folks can sign up to get alerts from the Civil Rights Defenders bracelets. People may also donate to the program.

[BBC, Natalia Project]

There's going to be a Jurassic Park 4, and there's some super-vague details coming out about what it's like. (Some kind of "scary" dinosaur will make a cameo?) The director is Colin Trevorrow, and last month he sent out this tweet:

No feathers. #JP4

— Colin Trevorrow (@colintrevorrow) March 20, 2013

We've known for a while now that many dinosaurs were feathered, instead of the more reptilian look we've been giving them. Which means this movie will be inaccurate. New Scientist has rounded up a couple quotes from scientists who are earnestly upset by this:

Yes, fair points. Absolutely. But. The whole conceit of Jurassic Parkis impossible. There's a lot of unrealistic stuff in the movies. Maybe it's just not the best learning environment?

[Twitter via New Scientist]

So the first thing to know about bats is that there are two different suborders, which vary in geographic location and behavior but most importantly, for our purposes, in cuteness. Microchiroptera is the kind of bat we're most familiar with here in the States; these are the little, semi-ugly ones that use echolocation to hunt. Now, we love all bats, because they are exceptionally fascinating creatures, but we're prepared to admit that microchiroptera is not the most attractive suborder out there.

Macrochiroptera, on the other hand, is adorable! This second suborder is also known as the "megabats," or, less scarily, as the fruit bats. These include the real big guys, like the flying foxes, but not all megabats are big. This little guy here is the blossom bat, and it's tiny--the smallest macrochiroptera in the world, small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of your hand.

The blossom bat is native to Australia, where it eats, as you might expect, nectar and pollen from flowers. It's not unlike a hummingbird in some ways; it's a very small pollinator, equipped with a long, sticky tongue to snatch up delicious sugary nectar. It's also quite rare, as it's particularly susceptible to the destruction of its natural habitat. This particular bat, a female named Blossom, was found as a baby "after a suspected cat attack," and rehabilitated at the Bat Conservation and Rescue Center. After a successful recovery, it was released back into the wild.

Click here to enter the gallery

BMW has just released images of its new Concept X4, the carmaker's second so-called Sports Activity Coupe. The five-door Concept X4 (which isn't exactly a concept-production is scheduled for 2014) is basically a luxury SUV combined with a coupe. The car will debut later this month at the big Shanghai auto show, but you can get a first look and some early details here. Check out the gallery!

Want to win this inflammable 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:

• The Changing Forensic Science Of Arson Is Freeing Innocent Convicts
• 9 Revolutionary Elevators From The Otis Elevator Company
• Nobody Wants A Facebook Phone
• This Sea Lion Is The First Non-Human Mammal That Can Keep A Beat On Its Own

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

• Warp Factor
• How Toxic Dumping Led To Tragedy In A Small Seaside Town
• April 2013's Hottest Gadgets
• The Most Powerful Supercomputer Of 2009 Is Already Obsolete
• Three Smart New Ways To Actually Block Robocalls
• Shakespeare: Hoarder, Playwright, Fake? A Physicist Turns To Statistics For Answers
• The 6 Most Absurd Military Hoaxes By North Korea And Iran
• Meet The NASA Scientist Who's Reinventing The Wheel
• How It Works: The Robotic Chicken Butcher
• Shakespeare: Hoarder, Playwright, Fake? A Physicist Turns To Statistics For Answers
• Super-Realistic Lego Objects And Other Amazing Images From This Week
• Why Dudes Who Can't Smell Never Get Laid
• How It Works: The Robotic Chicken Butcher
• How The World Will End, According To 1939
• Brain Wave Sensor Shields You From Phone Calls When Your Mind Is Too Busy
• BeerSci: Want To Wet-Hop Your Beer? Grow Your Own Fresh Hops

It's hard to comprehend the bravery required for a person to run into a burning building rather than flee from it. But in the near future, first responders to harrowing disasters and emergency situations aren't likely to even know what bravery is. Instead, they'll be emotionless robots that only exist to accomplish the task at hand, helping police, firefighters and homeland security personnel do an even better job of protecting people and saving lives.

While the modern field of robotics has benefited from many bursts of innovation since the late 1950s, the last decade has been its renaissance. Mankind's largest push to develop robots arguably began in the days immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when shoebox-size "PackBots" made by iRobot Corporation (best known for its semi-autonomous Roomba vacuum cleaner) were used to ensure the stability of rubble piles before first responders started their search for survivors at New York's World Trade Center site.

Soon thereafter, robots were deployed into the Middle East and Afghanistan along with American troops, where unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) were enlisted to defuse and detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs). One memorable example of the critical role often played by UGVs is the HD-1 robot (made by Remotec, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman), featured in the opening sequence of the 2008 Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker," where it was shown helping ground troops detonate an IED.

To date, the U.S. Army has purchased more than 7,000 such robots from private companies, a large portion of which have been deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least 750 have been rendered useless by bomb blasts or otherwise lost in combat, undoubtedly saving thousands of human lives in the act.

From war zones to our own home towns, robots are coming to our aid
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both winding down, the focus of many robot researchers, developers and manufacturers has shifted toward first response far away from the frontline, in efforts to protect those here in the U.S. Anti-terror bomb squads are one obvious customer base, as many of these machines are designed for explosive ordinance disposal (EOD). Remotec's line of Andros robots, which can climb stairs and can be outfitted with a number of tools, are used by 90 percent of bomb squads across the U.S., says Mark Kauchak, the company's director of sales and customer support.

Many different kinds of robots can help detonate or defuse bombs. Typically, they are controlled remotely and outfitted with multiple cameras and arm-like devices with grippers to lift and maneuver explosives. Some models can cut wires, or are outfitted with advanced sensors and chemical detectors to sniff out chemical and biological agents. Remotec's F6B, the company's best-selling bot, can also wield a shotgun to blast open doors, and can use other firearms to disable or detonate bombs, Kauchak says.

Bomb-detecting robots are even used at airports and by border patrols and port security personnel to thwart domestic terror threats. For example, a Boston-area company called Black-I Robotics built the LandShark Series D, a movable robotic platform powered by heavy-duty car batteries and electric hybrid motors that can be easily outfitted with an array of customized robotic capabilities such as sonar, minesweeping and explosives detection. The Massachusetts State Police bomb squad at Logan International Airport currently uses one such unit to screen for explosives. The company's founder, Brian Hart, was inspired to build the device after his son, Army Pvt. First Class John Hart, died in an ambush in Iraq at the age of 20. Telerob, based in Ostfildern, Germany, specializes in robots used to destroy or disarm bombs, as well.

Robots like these can also serve as eyes and ears in dangerous situations, to help find survivors of terrorist attacks or natural disasters. "Almost any emergency situation you can imagine gets better with a robot," says Susan Eustis, president of WinterGreen Research in Lexington, MA. Her firm's market study on first responder robots suggests that the market for these types of robots is likely to more than triple in size from $440.4 million in 2011 to $1.6 billion by 2018.

Semi-autonomous rescue robots are enhancing first responder services
When a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled the reactor at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March of 2011, iRobot Packbots withstood deadly levels of radiation to successfully enter reactor buildings and provide "the first observations inside the damaged reactors, map radiation levels, and assist with the clean-up efforts," says Tom Phelps, iRobot's director of robot products for North America.

Companies in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Korea also make similar robots for first responders in such dire situations. Among these is the British company QinetiQ, based in Farnborough, which makes robots for HAZMAT and search-and-rescue, and the Talon family of robots that helped sift through rubble after 9/11 at the World Trade Center site. Japanese-made robots initially failed to help at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant because they were vulnerable to radiation. But a caterpillar-shaped, radiation-tolerant robot called Quince (developed by scientists at Japan's Chiba Institute of Technology) was equipped with cameras, thermometers, hygrometers and dust collectors, and eventually performed several missions there.

Increasingly, rescue robots are able to operate autonomously without direct control by humans. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Tech, among others, are working to create robots that can communicate with each other and decide how best to explore and to concentrate their efforts. These robots can already create maps of a building's interior using lasers, without any human input. Such capabilities can be hugely useful in the event of a fire, for example, where on-the-ground information can give firefighters a better idea of how to best tackle the blaze.

Firefighters in South Korea are already experimenting with the Hoya firefighting robot, which can explore a blazing building to search for people, measure gas levels and air temperatures, and transmit that data back to its human handlers, while withstanding temperatures up to 320˚ F. (The Hoya is rugged enough to provide invaluable reconnaissance without putting firefighters at risk, but will not remain operational in the direct 400˚-800˚ F heat of a typical structural fire.) Similarly, Waterboro, Maine-based Howe and Howe Technologies makes a remote-controlled robot called the Thermite that can actually fight fires by dousing flames with up to 600 gallons of water per minute from a multi-directional nozzle-that's roughly three times the volume produced by a fire truck's traditional "crosslay" hose.

Remotec's newest UGV, the Titus, has several semi-autonomous functions, like climbing stairs without continued commands. And several iRobot products (like the five-pound FirstLook) are light enough to literally be thrown inside confined or inaccessible areas, and can turn over in place to right themselves and return to the spot from which they were thrown if they lose contact with their human counterparts.

On land, under water, or in the air, robots can lend a helping hand
Autonomy can be powerful, but it has its limitations. "A lot of people think you can turn on a robot and it'll do its own thing," Kauchak says. That's fine if you want it to clean your carpet, but not if you want it to disarm a bomb or take out a bad guy. "When we are dealing with explosives or people in hostage situations, you don't want to take the human out of that loop."

Another area of research could link humans and first responder robots. A computer system being developed by University of Dayton researcher Vijayan Asari uses a small robot with a camera to recognize people's faces and determine whether they are friend or foe based on a preset database. It then analyzes facial features and gestures to assess if the person is in pain, with the end goal of bringing wounded soldiers or survivors to the nearest medical facility. The same robot could be modified, though, to assess a person's behavior and determine their identity, Asari says. "This application could be extended to any emergency environment where we can send the robot inside to automatically find individuals."

Most first responder bots are ground-based, but some can actually fly. Several police departments around the country already use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in hostage and other emergency scenarios. These so-called drones are likely to be used more and more by law enforcement and homeland security, says WinterGreen Research's Eustis.

In February 2012, Congress enacted a law that provides funding for a nationwide broadband network-First Responder Network Authority, or FirstNet-that will help police, firefighters, emergency medical professionals and others streamline communications during disasters and perform their jobs at a higher, and safer, level. This network "can be used to communicate with robots used in emergency situations" and should help encourage this market segment, Eustis says.

"We anticipate that by 2015 robots will be fully integrated in 25 percent of first-responder teams," she says. There are already some 300 emergency response teams in the U.S. that use robots to some degree, she says, including those in major cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as those in smaller cities and towns like Akron, OH.

A competition to determine the best-of-breed first responder robots
An important moment for many robotics developers will come this December, when the Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency (DARPA) will hold the first of two remaining Robotics Challenges to identify the most capable ground-based first-responder robots. The machine contestants will be judged on criteria like how well they drive and exit a vehicle, walk through a pile of rubble, remove rocks from a doorway, climb a ladder, and break through a rock wall to find and close a leaking valve. The winner will receive $2 million.

The global competition, which started in 2012 and ends in late 2014, involves bots from a wide range of companies, universities, and governments. Most entries look humanoid, with two legs and arms-a logical design for performing human-like functions in spaces created by humans-but not all of them. One four-legged model built by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called the RoboSimian, incorporates the radial symmetry of a starfish with the aesthetic profile of a giant bug.

The NASA scientists, with their expertise gleaned from having built three robots that have successfully motored and drilled their way around Mars, may be tough to beat. But regardless of who wins, robots have climbed and motored their way to become a primary tool of first responders, and their use will undoubtedly grow. "We have aggressive forecasts on this," Eustis says. "It's just really getting started."

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Bio
Douglas Main writes about science and related topics for Livescience.com. He has written about a wide variety of topics for the New York Times Green Blog, Popular Mechanics, and Discover Magazine, among others. He received an M.A. in journalism from New York University and studied biology and English literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York City.

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