Bike theft is damnably common; most people don't bother tracking their bikes, even the best locks are pretty easy to cut through, and the resale market is constantly booming. I myself have lost two bikes to thieves. A Kickstarter project called the BikeSpike could be a solution to this problem.

BikeSpike is constructed of most of the same sensors as a smartphone, including a cellular connection, an accelerometer, and a GPS chip. It's a little box you clip onto the frame of your bike (cleverly, you can also get a water bottle holder that disguises the box, stopping clever thieves from just ripping the box off). You pay a monthly fee--either $7 or $13 per month, though if you fund the project on Kickstarter, you'll get a discounted fee for life--and the BikeSpike will keep you up to date on the whereabouts of your bike. You can "lock" it, which just means you get an instant notification if the bike is moved from its parking spot. Handy!

So you can always see exactly where your bike is, but you can also see if anyone crashed into it--that's thanks to the accelerometer, which can sense when some maniac cabdriver smashes into your legally-parked bike. You can also use it for various games and stat-tracking, though it seems most of that function will be up to developers to create later, through an open API.

There's only a few hours left on the Kickstarter, and the project is still a few thousand dollars away from funding. But if you're tuning up your bike now in preparation for a summer of riding, it seems like a good anti-theft solution--and it's cheaper now than it will be later. Check out the project here.

Psychiatrists have known about seasonal affective disorder--a mood disorder in which otherwise healthy people experience depression during the winter or heightened anxiety during the summer--since the early 1980s. Treatment for the winter blues often involves light therapy, with the idea being that short, dark days are kind of depressing.

But a new study suggests that all mental major illnesses, including anxiety, eating disorders, schizophrenia, ADHD, bipolar, and OCD, might get worse during the winter. Researchers analyzed Google searches for information about mental health in the U.S. and Australia from 2006 to 2010. They found that, in both countries, all mental illness queries were consistently higher in winter than in summer.

During U.S. summers, searches for eating disorders and schizophrenia declined 37 percent; ADHD queries fell by 28 percent; and searches for suicide decreased 24 percent. Searches about anxiety showed the smallest seasonal change, declining by 7 percent during summer. The stats were similar in Australia, with the exception of anxiety, which dipped 15 percent during summers.

"We didn't expect to find similar winter peaks and summer troughs for queries involving every specific mental illness or problem we studied, however, the results consistently showed seasonal effects across all conditions--even after adjusting for media trends," says James Niels Rosenquist, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Of course, just because someone is searching for a mental illness doesn't mean he or she has that mental illness. It's also not clear whether the increase in searches for mental health information is related to social, environmental, or biological factors, says lead investigator John W. Ayers, a professor at San Diego State University. Ayers says the consistent seasonal impact suggests a potential for a universal mental health therapy, like the sunlight-derived Vitamin D.

The study appears in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Whenever I call my mom to ask how to make something, I always get really vague advice like, "Cook it until it's thick, but not too thick" or "Add a couple smallish handfuls of flour." Or she gives me measurements in weights, which was how she was taught to cook, rather than volumes. This futuristic idea would capture and canonize Mom's cooking for anyone to reproduce perfectly.

Spanish product design student Carlos Gurpegui came up with a kitchen setup that records video, audio, temperatures, times-pretty much everything a person does inside the setup. This could be especially helpful for cooks like my mom, who don't work by recipes and don't know the standard measures for what they do. Perhaps it could help capture traditional recipes that haven't been written down, preserving them for future generations.

Gurpegui submitted the idea to the Electrolux Design Lab, an annual international competition for design students to sketch out high-tech home appliances. PopSci has covered Electrolux Design Lab ideas over the past few years.

The competition's first-place winner gets a six-month internship at Electrolux, an appliance company based in Sweden, plus 5,000 euros (about $6,500). Gurpegui's idea is one of about 100 selected from 1,700 applications in the first round, according to Electrolux.

Maybe it's because Jurassic Park is in theaters again, but we at Universe Today sometimes worry about how one person can mess up an otherwise technologically amazing system. It took just one nefarious employee to shut down the dinosaur park's security fences in the movie and cause havoc. How do we ensure science can fight against that, especially when everyday citizens are getting more and more involved in the scientific process?

But perhaps, after talking to Chris Lintott, that view is too suspicious. Lintott is in charge of a collaborative astronomy and science project called the Zooniverse that uses public contributions to fuel some of the science he performs. Basically, anyone with an Internet connection and a desire to contribute can hunt for planets or examine astronomical objects, among many other projects.

Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, says the science requires public contributions. Moreover, he hasn't had a problem yet despite 800,000 individual contributors to the Zooniverse. He told Universe Today about how that's possible in an e-mail interview.

1) Zooniverse has already produced tangible scientific results in space through collaborating with ordinary folks. Can you talk about some of the papers/findings that have been produced in your various projects?

There's a long, long list. I'm particularly excited at the minute about our work on bulgeless galaxies; most spiral galaxies have a bulge full of old stars at their centre, but we've found plenty that don't. That's exciting because we think that means that they're guaranteed not to have had a big merger in the last 10 billion years or so, and that means we can use them to figure out just what effect mergers have on galaxies. You'll be hearing more about them in the next year or so as we have plenty of observing time lined up.

I'm also a big fan of Planet Hunters 1b, our first confirmed planet discovery - it's a planet in a four-star system, and thus provides a nice challenge to our understanding of how planets form. We've found lots of planet candidates (systems where we're more than 90% sure there's a planet there) but it's nice to get one confirmed and especially nice for it to be such an interesting world.

2) What benefits have you received from involving the public in space projects, in terms of results as well as raising awareness?

We couldn't do our research any other way. Astronomers have got very good in the last few decades at collecting information about the universe, but we're not always so good at learning how to use all of that information. The Zooniverse allows us to collaborate with hundreds of thousands of people so that we can scale our efforts to deal with that flood of data, and many of those volunteers go much further than just clicking on buttons we provide. So really our research is now driven in collaboration with thousands of people, spread all around the world - that's an inspiring thought.

3) How many people do you manage in your space projects, approximately? How do you keep track of them all?

We have more than 800,000 registered volunteers - luckily, the computer keeps track of them (when they log in!).

4) How do you ensure their results meet the standards of scientific publication?

We carefully design projects so that we're sure they will produce scientifically useful results before they're launched; this usually means running a test with a small amount of data and comparing work done by volunteers with that of professionals. We usually find the volunteers are better than us! It helps that we have several people complete each task, so collectively we don't make accidental mistakes.

5) How do you guard against somebody deliberately or accidentally altering the results?

The system insists that every classification is independent, and as we have several people look at each classification finding any deliberate attack would be easy - in any case, we've never seen any evidence of such a thing. Despite popular reports, most people are nice!

This article was republished with permission from Universe Today.

A team of physicists from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh has developed laser technology that can 3-D image an object up to a kilometer away. The system can accurately (within a millimeter) image even "uncooperative" objects -- meaning those that don't easily reflect laser pulses, like fabric. Though at a kilometer away, it can probably capture an uncooperative human, too.

The imaging technique is called "time-of-flight," or ToF. It runs a low-power infrared laser beam over an object, preferably one that's not moving, like a parked car, then records how long the photons in the laser beam take to bounce off the object and return to their laser-home.

ToF imaging systems are already used in some machine navigation, like autonomous vehicles, but generally they only have a short range and can't image all surfaces. The Heriot-Watt team's system specifically detects longer wavelengths of light that are redder than visible light and can travel more easily. A superconducting nanowire sensor counts individual photons in the laser beam, allowing it to more accurately record depth.

"It is clear that the system would have to be miniaturized and made more rugged, but we believe that a lightweight, fully portable scanning depth imager is possible and could be a product in less than five years," according to Aongus McCarthy, the lead author on the paper in Optics Express last week. He said in a press statement that it could ultimately have a range of up to 10 kilometers.

Gerald Buller, one of the study's co-authors, told Wired that the technology could be used by the military to help drones see their targets. It could also scan vegetation to determine the health of plants in the forest, or be modified to work underwater to scan oceans and lakes for depth.

And for those who are a bit laser-shy: Human skin doesn't reflect enough photons to be accurately imaged, so complete nudity should be your first defense.

[BBC News]

Though its name sounds better suited to fantasy or sci-fi, researchers have recently gathered evidence that something called dark lightning exists, the Washington Post reported.

Like any evil twin, dark lightning appears to "compete" with the ordinary lightning during thunderstorms.

A person could be struck by dark lightning and not even know it.

Like ordinary lightning, dark lightning brews inside thunderclouds. In fact, it may be a competing way for the clouds to release their energy, says Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology. Dwyer has come up with a model explaining how dark lightning arises. His idea awaits further measurements for confirmation.

Scientists first began seeing hints of dark lightning from gamma ray measurements from satellites since at least the 1990s, according to this NASA video. Gamma rays, the most energetic wave in the electromagnetic spectrum, are typically associated with radioactive decay, nuclear detonations and supernova explosions. Dark lightning appears to be made of X-rays and gamma rays.

Although no one knows for sure, humans may have been struck by dark lightning before, most likely during an airplane ride, Dwyer told the Washington Post. Even that is unlikely: Pilots usually stay away from storms, and dark lightning flashes are rare compared to ordinary lightning bolts. If hit, however, plane passengers probably wouldn't hear or feel the strike, but they would absorb what Dwyer estimated to be an entire lifetime's worth of safe radiation.

[Washington Post]

More than 30 years after it was removed from the U.S. market, a morning sickness drug originally sold under the name Bendectin has been approved by the FDA.

In the early 1980s, a string of lawsuits claimed that Benedictin, a morning sickness drug sold in the U.S. starting in 1956, caused birth defects. Though no such link had been proven, Merrel Dow, the company that made the drug, took it off the market rather than go to court. But a Canadian company called Duchesnay continued to sell the drug under the name Diclegis in the Great White (vomit-free) North.

Studies have shown that the drug doesn't actually pose any threat to the fetus, and since the drug's disappearance, doctors have been advising morning-sickness besieged women to mix their own homemade version of Benedictin/Diclegis at home (fun!) with the active ingredients--vitamin B6 and doxylamine, a drug found in many over-the-counter sleep aids.

The FDA announced yesterday that it has approved the ready-made version, Diclegis. It's currently the only FDA-approved treatment for pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting.

So puke no more, ladies! U.S. sales are set to begin in June. If you're considering starting a family, you may want to plan accordingly.

[Chemistry World]

In the back of your nasal cavity, you have special sensory cells that grab onto the various airborne compounds that constitute "a smell." They interpret those chemicals, shoot the result over to your brain, and you get the sense of smelling something. But researchers have recently discovered that it's not only these nasal cells that can interpret smells.

The team found that primary blood cells, isolated from the blood in which they typically swim, have olfactory sensors as well. The experiment placed smelly chemical compounds on the other side of a wall from these blood cells, which moved toward them. That indicates that the blood cells have some way to detect the compounds, a new discovery.

We have already found taste receptors in somewhat unexpected places, like the stomach and, lungs. It's not clear, though, why the heart would need such a sense. That said, whether your heart can smell the food you're eating is a different question than whether it does smell the food. Still, pretty fascinating to know that our noses aren't the only body parts with a sense of smell.

The research was undertaken by a team at the Technical University of Munich and presented in New Orleans this weekend at the National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. You can read the press release here.

An old folk remedy involving hairy bean leaves strewn around the bedroom may have a new life as a modern bed bug trap, according to new research from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Kentucky. With insecticide resistance on the rise, such a device could be a helpful tool for treating bed bug infestations.

Although its mechanisms weren't known at the time, the tactic dates back to at least 1678, when the English philosopher John Locke wrote of placing kidney bean leaves under the pillow or around the bed to keep bed bugs from biting as he traveled through Europe.

In the early twentieth century, the approach was also common throughout the Balkans, according to a 1927 report from the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army. That report suggested the leaves stunned the bloodsucking bugs as they traveled from hiding places to their sleeping hosts during the night; in the morning, the bug-covered leaves were removed and burned (dense infestations could allegedly amass over two pounds of the buggy leaves in a single room).

American entomologists studying the effect in the 1940s noted the bed bugs "could hardly be induced to move from the leaves," and microscopic images suggested that fine, curved hairs called trichomes on the bottom of the leaves snagged the bugs' feet.

Now, the California-Kentucky team has zoomed in even closer to reveal that the leaves' sharp trichomes actually pierce the bugs' feet like meat hooks, immobilizing them.

"It was astonishing to me that it worked at all," says Catherine Loudon, a physical biologist at UC-Irvine and lead researcher of the new study, "You see this big muscular bug vigorously struggling, and it's astonishing to me that the little tiny microscopic hairs don't snap."

Loudon's team tipped single male bed bugs from a glass vial onto the bottom surface of kidney bean leaves, which usually captured the bugs within seconds (they used males, rather than a mix of both sexes, to avoid making baby bed bugs).

A low-vacuum scanning electron microscope (LV-SEM) allowed the researchers to examine the bugs while they were still trapped on the leaves. The images revealed that the trichosomes sometimes hooked the bugs' feet like Velcro, but more often went right through. Some bugs were able to rip themselves free by breaking the trichome or rending their own flesh, but they were usually recaptured.

While there is no evolutionary connection between bed bugs and bean leaves, similar trichomes on other plants are known to capture ants, aphids, bees, flies, and leafhoppers, among other species. Scientists hypothesize that the structures first evolved for other reasons, possibly to retain water, with the defensive role coming later.

Of course, keeping fresh bean leaves on hand isn't an easy bed bug fix, says Loudon: "The inconvenience of bean leaves is that not everyone wants them scattered around their bed room." Synthetics mimicking the surface of the bean leaf, however, could be placed "as a ring around the bed legs, a floor mat at the door, a strip on the bed board, it could be something one put's in one's suitcase," Loudon adds, since bed bugs "really only get from one place to another by walking or being carried."

Ideally, a synthetic version would have the same geometry and physical properties as a real leaf, meaning the trichomes would be in the same locations and would move the same way as a bug walks through. To do this, Loudon and her team used dental impression putty to create negative molds from the surface of the real bean leaves, then filled these molds with epoxies of varying strengths and stiffnesses.

While the spacing of the trichome replicas matched the original leaves perfectly, none of the synthetic leaves worked as well as the real leaves, in part because the thin hooked ends of many of the trichomes broke off during the molding process. And, unlike the natural trichomes, which are hollow, the synthetic versions were solid, which meant they moved differently as the bugs walked through.

Loudon adds that the team is working on new synthetic versions that may address these issues, and has also optioned the technology to an undisclosed company.

Of course, a bed bug trap only works if a bed bug actually walks through it, which means it is unlikely that even a crafty biomimetic material will be a final solution for a bed bug infestation, but instead one part of an approach that may include heat, steam, vacuuming, and insecticides.

Brooke Borel is a contributing editor at Popular Science and is writing a book about bed bugs for the University of Chicago Press. Follow her on Twitter @brookeborel.

A beehive buzzes with thousands of genetically similar female honeybees. Some nurse their queen and her eggs while others fly out in search of pollen and nectar. For decades, scientists knew that bees took on new jobs as they aged, but a team of researchers recently discovered that chemical tags attached to the bees' DNA play an important role in determining their career paths. The tags, which are frequently methyl groups, control gene expression, which in turn affects how an organism behaves. Both the chemical tags and the behavior they induce appear to be reversible, says Arizona State University biologist Gro Amdam. Foraging bees, for instance, could become nurses if the hive requires it. Humans also carry epigenetic tags that may affect their behavior. Scientists found methyl groups attached to a stress-hormone-receptor gene in child-abuse victims who committed suicide. If these chemical cues can be changed in bees, scientists may find new treatments for people with psychological trauma, mood disorders, and learning disabilities too.

Flowering Season
To exploit the increase in available food, young bees that would normally become nurses immediately develop into foragers, a switch reflected by changes in their epigenetic tags.

Base Population
An average hive has 10,000 to 50,000 workers. At any given time, foragers account for about 30 percent of the workforce, but that proportion can change depending on environmental factors.

Swarming Effect
When a queen gets old, she flees the hive with a swarm of mostly nurse bees, leaving the colony and its larvae to her successor. Some foragers and free-agent bees will then shift to nursing. In a lab experiment, after half of a hive's population was taken away, only 10 percent of foragers became nurses. Scientists say that fragility may keep many foragers from making the switch. Foragers are programmed to be frail in order to protect the colony: Rather than bring infections or toxins back to the hive, they typically die out in the field.

Queen
When a colony's queen grows old or infirm, nurse bees secrete a royal jelly high in fatty acids and protein and feed it to a few larvae. The diet encourages ovaries to develop and produces a new queen who will spend her days laying thousands of genetically similar eggs.

Nurse
Most female bees begin their lives as nurses who care for the queen and larvae. They clean wax cells for the queen's eggs and feed the larvae honey and pollen.

Forager
When most nurse bees turn two to three weeks old, the gene expression in their brains changes, and they switch to foraging for pollen, nectar, and water outside the hive using the sun as their compass. However, scientists have discovered this job change is flexible: Workers of any age can nurse or forage.

Drone
Male honeybees, which carry only one set of chromosomes, fertilize the queen's eggs.

A nurse bee starts with a few DNA tags [1]. More tags turn it into a forager [2]. Tag removal reverts the bee to a nurse role [3].

HOW EPIGENETIC TAGS WORK

Tags: Enzymes such as methyltransferase help transfer epigenetic tags to DNA. The mechanism for inducing epigenetic changes in bees is not well understood, but scientists suspect that pheromones exuded by the forager bees might play a role.

Genes: Epigenetic tags, such as methyl groups, determine how much of a gene is expressed or whether the gene is expressed at all.

Proteins: The tags also dictate how pieces of genes are assembled into an mRNA transcript, which eventually determines the type of protein made from that gene. A protein produced in a nurse bee will look different and serve a different function than one produced in a forager.

STATS

Queens per Hive: 1
Workers per Queen: 10,000-50,000
Average Lifespan of a Worker Bee, in Months: 3
Managed Honeybee Colonies in 2011 in the U.S.: 2.49 Million

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

Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Tennessee and the Dakotas are the freest states in the U.S., according to a new analysis. Sound like places where you'd want to live?

The analysis comes from the market research center at George Mason University in Virginia. It uses numerous measurements of freedom. Some of the weightiest measures include tax burden, the legal climate for businesses and how often people are incarcerated for "victimless crimes" such as illegal gambling or drug use.

Not everyone will agree that all of the freedoms are positive. For example, different people will surely want more or less stringent rent control laws, gun control laws and same-sex marriage availability. The George Mason analysis counts less rent control, less gun control and more marriage equality as more freedom.

The map's creators make their own stance clear. In a YouTube video, they poke fun at Vermont and New York for being "weighed down by taxation and debt," while in blog posts, they write about the advantages of greater freedom as they define it. Nevertheless, their online app offers a cool function: You can make your own map including only the freedoms you want. Go to "Personal Rank" in the top menu and click on the names of the larger categories to see more specific categories you can select as you desire.

If it were really possible to build a warp drive, using it wouldn't make you fly back into your seat as in a science-fiction movie. "Inside the spaceship, it would feel absolutely normal," says physicist Dave Goldberg of Drexel University. "You would be weightless, of course, because you wouldn't have any acceleration on you at all."

That assumes you're on the inside of what's known as an Alcubierre Bubble-a hypothetical construct that could allow a patch of space to travel at many times the speed of light [see "Warp Factor"]. The crew of a spaceship that had entered such a bubble probably wouldn't have any sense of traveling at warp speed-"once you're in there, it's the most blasé thing in the world," says Goldberg-but crossing the bubble's border would be gut-wrenching. It could be as violent as falling into a black hole: The space-time deformation at the edge of the bubble would create an enormous tidal effect, one strong enough to rip your bones apart.

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.

Robert G. Edwards, a British physiologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010 for his pioneering work on in vitro fertilization, died today. In the 1960s, Edwards and his collaborator Patrick Steptoe began working on artificial fertilization, finally succeeding after eight years of work--at which point they were the center of a fiery controversy about the morality of this technique.

Despite the controversy, in vitro fertilization has been a gift to those who are unable to naturally conceive, and since 1978, millions of babies have been born this way. Edwards was 87, and according to Cambridge University, where he was a professor, he died peacefully in his sleep. You can read the university's statement here.

Marcin Jakubowski didn't study fusion physics to become a farmer. But the Polish-American scientist grew more disillusioned with academia the longer he worked toward his doctorate. Researchers withheld data to compete for grants, he says, instead of collaborating to solve big problems. "The further I went in my Ph.D. program, the less value I felt I was contributing to society," he says. Seeking a fresh start, Jakubowski bought 30 acres of Missouri farmland and a tractor. Life in relative seclusion proved uneventful until, one day in 2008, his tractor broke down for the second and last time, spurring him to start an open-source industrial revolution.

To Jakubowski, the tractor seemed designed to fail. Why should he sink more money into fixing it or buy a replacement? He wanted a simple and useful machine, and one he could repair and upgrade on the fly. "It boiled down to lower cost in the long run," he says.

Jakubowski built the first LifeTrac, as he calls his DIY tractor, in three months for $6,000-about $30,000 less than a comparable mass-produced model. Seeing room for improvement, he built a second prototype in just six days. He posted his progress on the tractor and other machines to an online wiki, which attracted followers, who suggested their own design tweaks. Some even visited in person to help with builds-and Open Source Ecology took off.

Led by Jakubowski, the group now designs open-source agro-industrial machines on his "Factor e Farm." The fourth iteration of LifeTrac isn't like the industrial equipment on most farms; it works with a variety of custom attachments, including two removable, office-copier-size hydraulic engines called Power Cubes. The cubes also power other pieces of the Global Village Construction Set: 50 machines-ranging from 3-D printers and CNC mills to bakery ovens and brick presses-that the group deems essential to modern society (see "Multipurpose Power," next page).

Jakubowski isn't preparing for the apocalypse, even though his civilization starter kit might come in handy after one. Rather, he wants to equip the world with affordable tools that enable productive farming, manufacturing, and other accoutrements of civilized life. Open Source Ecology has prototyped 15 of 50 designs so far, and Jakubowski plans to create the rest by the end of 2015.

Once all of the blueprints hit the Web, the group will shift from prototyping to multiplying. The idea: With a few raw materials and a starter construction set, users could copy all the machines. Jakubowski hopes to field-test the concept around the world at centers where people learn to build the machines-and, in the spirit of open source, improve the original designs. "This isn't about free versus paid," Jakubowski says. "When people are free to build on each other's work, innovation can increase exponentially."

(Get the specifics of the project on the next page)/>

HOW IT WORKS

1) Two Power Cubes, each a 28-horsepower gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic pump (inset), lend the LifeTrac its muscle. Quick-connect mounts let users swap cubes into other machines.

2) Hydraulic motors drive the wheels, which operate in pairs to move the 4,000-pound tractor on tank-like treads. When equipped with two Power Cubes, the LifeTrac can drag two tons of weight.

3) LifeTrac's creators designed their multi-purpose tractor around a frame of sturdy, four-inch-wide steel tubes. Loader arms made from the tubes can lift loads weighing up to four tons.

4) Versatility defines the LifeTrac. In addition to a simple shovel, Open Source Ecology is prototyping attachments such as seeders, rototillers, well-drilling rigs, balers, and brick presses.

MULTIPURPOSE POWER

Maintaining a fleet of machines with different engines is arduous and expensive. The Global Village Construction Set attacks both problems with a single, versatile power source called the Power Cube. Below are a few of the machines and capabilities that a cube could enable by 2015.

WARNING: We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

Paolo Soleri, the futuristic, eco-conscious architect, died yesterday at 93.

He is best known among the masses (and in the scientific community, to some extent) for his planned city of Arcosanti, a sort of Xanadu for the eco-conscious set. When it broke ground in 1970, Soleri saw the proposed 5,000-person city-complex north of Phoenix as a place where cars would be unnecessary and resources used only minimally. It's compact and, since it's elevated about 3,700 feet, it's literally a city on a hill. The buildings share the mostly brown palette of the surrounding desert, but a panoramic view shows a skyline full of unexpectedly lovely geometric shapes.

Arcosanti remains a work in progress. It has been under construction, off and on, for more than 40 years, and plans are less than 5 percent complete. Today, it is largely a tourist destination, with just 55 people living there full-time.

But it now doubt inspired other generations of architects and artists. Architects like Arizona-based Will Bruder have named Soleri as an influence. (Soleri himself was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.) Soleri coined the term "arcology" (a portmanteau of architecture and ecology) for Arcosanti, and plans for other "green" cities have been influenced by his concept. Foster + Partners, for example, is designing the zero-emissions, car-free Masdar City in Abu Dhabi.

Many of Soleri's other projects were completed. Cosanti, his home and studio in Paradise Valley, Arizona, is another popular tourist stop. Outside of Arizona, the Italian-born Soleri created a well-received ceramics sculptural-ceramics factory in Naples and the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Soleri will be buried at Arcosanti.

[azcentral]

Move over Kepler. NASA has recently green-lighted two new missions as part of its Astrophysics Explorer Program.

These come as the result of four proposals submitted in 2012. The most anticipated and high profile mission is TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

Slated for launch in 2017, TESS will search for exoplanets via the transit method, looking for faint tell-tale dips in brightness as the unseen planet passes in front of its host star. This is the same method currently employed by Kepler, launched in 2009. Unlike Kepler, which stares continuously at a single segment of the sky along the galactic plane in the direction of the constellations Cygnus, Hercules, and Lyra, TESS will be the first dedicated all-sky exoplanet hunting satellite.

The mission will be a partnership of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, Orbital Sciences Corporation, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

TESS will launch onboard an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket released from the fuselage of a Lockheed L-1011 aircraft, the same system that deployed IBEX in 2008 & NuSTAR in 2012. NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will also launch using a Pegasus XL rocket this summer in June.

"TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission. It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth," said George Riker, a senior researcher from MKI.

TESS will utilize four wide angle telescopes to get the job done. The effective size of the detectors onboard is 192 megapixels. TESS is slated for a two year mission. Unlike Kepler, which sits in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, TESS will be in an elliptical path in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

TESS will examine approximately 2 million stars brighter than 12th magnitude including 1,000 of the nearest red dwarfs. Not only will TESS expand the growing catalog of exoplanets, but it is also expected to find planets with longer orbital periods.

One dilemma with the transit method is that it favors the discovery of planets with short orbital periods, which are much more likely to be seen transiting their host star from a given vantage point in space.

TESS will also serve as a logical progression from Kepler to later proposed exoplanet search platforms. TESS will also discover candidates for further scrutiny by as the James Webb Space Telescope to be launched in 2018 and the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrometer based at La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Also on the board for launch in 2017 is NICER, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer to be placed on the exterior of the International Space Station. NICER will employ an array 56 telescopes which will collect and study X-rays from neutron stars. NICER will specialize in the study of a particular sub-class of neutron star known as millisecond pulsars. The X-ray telescopes are in a configuration utilizing a set of nested glass shells looking like the layers of an onion.

Observing pulsars in the X-ray range of the spectrum will offer scientists tremendous insight into their inner workings and structure. The International Space Station offers a unique vantage point to do this sort of science. Like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), the power requirements of NICER dictate that it cannot be a free-flying satellite. X-Ray astronomy must also be done above the hindering effects of the Earth's atmosphere.

NICER will be deployed as an exterior payload aboard an ISS ExPRESS Logistics Carrier. These are unpressurized platforms used for experiments that must be directly exposed to space.

Another fascinating project working in tandem with NICER is SEXTANT, the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing And Navigation Technology. This project seeks to test the precision of millisecond pulsars for interplanetary navigation.

"They (pulsars) are extremely reliable celestial clocks and can provide high-precision timing just like the atomic signals supplied through the 26-satellite military operated Global Positioning System (GPS)," said NASA Goddard scientist Zaven Arzoumanian. The chief difficulty with relying on this system for interplanetary journeys is that the signal gets progressively weaker the farther you travel from the Earth.

"Pulsars, on the other hand, are accessible in virtually every conceivable flight regime, from LEO to interplanetary and deepest space," said NICER/SEXTANT principle investigator Keith Gendreau.

Both NICER and TESS follow the long legacy of NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program, which can be traced all the way back to the launch Explorer 1. This was the very first U.S. satellite launched in 1958. Explorer 1 discovered the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the Earth.

"The Explorer Program has a long and stellar history of deploying truly innovative missions to study some of the most exciting questions in space science," stated NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld. "With these missions, we will learn about the most extreme states of matter by studying neutron stars and we will identify many nearby star systems with rocky planets in the habitable zones for further study by telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope."

Of course, Grunsfeld is referring to planets orbiting red dwarf stars, which will be targeted by TESS. These are expected have a habitable zone much closer to their primary star than our own Sun. It has even been suggested by MIT scientists that the first exoplanets visited by humans on some far off date might be initially discovered by TESS. The spacecraft may also discover future targets for follow up spectroscopic analysis, the best chance of discovering alien life on an exoplanet in the next 50 years. One can imagine the excitement that a positive detection of a chemical exclusive to life as we know it such as chlorophyll in the spectra of a far of world would generate. More ominously, detection of such synthetic elements as plutonium in the atmosphere of an exoplanet might suggest we found them… but alas, too late.

But on a happier note, it'll be exciting times for space exploration to see both projects get underway. Perhaps human explorers will indeed one day visit the worlds discovered by TESS… and use navigation techniques pioneered by SEXTANT to do it!

This article was republished with permission fromUniverse Today

A new lab technique now lets scientists make gorgeous, fully intact images of bodily organs such as the brain.

A team of engineers has developed a way to turn organs from mammals, such as lab mice or human bodies donated to science, transparent. Once transparent, scientists can add chemicals to the organs that attach to and highlight specific features, such as different cell types. The result is an intact organ that scientists can see inside and study.

Because such visualization can be great for whole-organ studies, this isn't the first time scientists have tried to make some transparent brains. This new technique, called CLARITY, works better with chemical labels and is quicker than previous techniques, CLARITY's developers wrote in a paper they published today in the journal Nature.

To demonstrate their technique, the engineers, who are all from Stanford University, imaged some mouse brains:

Or check out this Nature video to see some more images, plus some rotations:

Making these images is an eight-day process. The Stanford researchers started by infusing a mouse brain with a hydrogel solution. They then put the gel and brain into an incubator to set. (Like making Jell-O! Except that the setting, in this case, required a higher temperature rather than a lower one.)

The set gel bound to and physically supported most of the things in the brain. The gel didn't bind to lipids, or fats, in the brain, however. Such fat is opaque and surrounds each cell. When researchers extracted this unbound fat, they were left with a clear view of everything else, frozen in place. For example, proteins that were originally embedded in cell membranes and the little spines that come off of neurons both remained.

At this point, the researchers could add different molecules to color the parts of the brain they want to study and look at the whole thing under a light microscope.