When Popular Science tested the first computer programs to prepare tax returns in February 1983, we wanted to know two things: Would it be faster than doing it by hand? Would it save us money? (We also enjoyed the idea of a personified computer punching greedy Uncle Sam in the nose.)

Writer Gordon McComb tried out three scenarios. First, McComb asked the computer to recalculate his 1981 tax return. Second, he asked it to determine whether averaging his income would save him money. Finally, he wanted see how well he'd do with both income-averaging and itemized deductions. And then the big gee-whiz happened:

You can read the rest of the story, including not-so-nostalgia-inducing descriptions of Aardvark's Professional Tax Planner and Datamost's Tax Beater, in our February 1983 issue.

Today, while poking around Google, you might've noticed the lovely doodle honoring Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. He deserves that doodle! Euler was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and possibly the most prolific.

Publishing almost 900 papers and books (!) while also going blind (!!) Euler made major contributions to mathematics, physics, and plenty of other scientific fields. The Google doodle references a few: that movable wheel in the center represents his rotation theorem.

But even if you were to discount all of his scientific contributions (don't, please; there are so, so many), you'd still probably be interested by the marginalia that's attributed to him. His work laid the foundation for Venn diagrams, and he might've indirectly fathered sudoku by inventing the un-repeating rows and columns of a Latin Square.

It would take a longer article than this to go into all of Euler's accomplishments. He seemed to be living his life in fast-forward: he received his master's at 16 and by 19 published his first paper. Even after his death in 1783 (he was 76), Euler left enough work that his papers continued to be published for another 30 years.

Explosions at the finish line at the Boston Marathon this afternoon got us wondering: What is the security typically like for marathons? It turns out surveillance is tight during marathons in major cities. Meanwhile, the events in Boston have already prompted some reactions in New York and London.

Typical preparations for marathons in major cities include welding manhole covers shut and a thorough pre-race route examination, expert Anthony Roman told the New York Times. For the New Year's in Times Square in New York, city officials remove mailboxes in which terrorists could hide bombs. During a race, police keep an eye on the ground using rooftop snipers, helicopters and analytic cameras that read license plates.

In 2008, homeland security expert Arnold Bogis wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe describing how city officials use marathons and other popular events as testing grounds for emergency preparedness measures. For example, Boston Marathon officials have tested a barcode tracking system for runners during previous races. During this year's race, runners wore chip-based trackers that friends and family may now check on the Boston Marathon website.

The New York Police Department has stepped up security around hotels, subways and other important landmarks in New York City, CBS New York reported. In December, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told RT that the police believe terrorists could easily set up snipers in a private hotel room. New Yorkers may see counter-terrorism vehicles driving around the city.

Organizers of the London Marathon, set for Sunday, April 21, are reviewing their security measures, the Associated Press reports.

Boston officials have shut down cellphone service to the city, to prevent any remote detonations, the AP reports.While cellphone service may be spotty because of heavy call traffic, Verizon and Sprint officials say they haven't received any shutdown requests, the AP reports.

Two blasts went off in quick succession about four hours after the start of the men's race today. Many runners were still crossing the finish line at the time, and spectators were lined up in the area. Twenty-three people were injured and two people died, the Boston Globe reported at about 4:24 p.m. local time. And officials have found and dismantled additional devices.

An unnamed senior counterterrorism official told the New York Times that it's too soon to tell if the Boston Marathon blasts are terrorism-related.

Astronauts take a lot of photos of Earth, for personal use and for specific experiments on board the International Space Station. NASA saves them on a server, and now a data cruncher has mapped them all.

Nathan Bergey went through the entire archive, which contains about 1.1 million images, and cataloged them by location and mission. "Coastlines, islands and cities seem to be popular targets. So much so that it's possible to make out basic continents," he writes.

These photos were taken in every mission since the station's founding in 2000, but there was a major ramp-up around Expedition 30, which started in November 2011. Incidentally, astronaut Don Pettit took almost half of the archive's images during his time on Expedition 30/31, including some awesome time-lapse sequences of the station's orbit.

Check out Bergey's full project on his website.

Multiple explosions were triggered at the finish line of the Boston Marathon today, with at the time of writing an estimated two dead and dozens injured. We know many are trying to get in touch with people who were running the race or nearby, but with cell service all but disabled and communication avenues totally chaotic, it can be difficult to do, or even exacerbate the communication problems for others. Here are some tips.

Avoid Phone Calls

The lines get jammed easily, and some have been shut down to better serve emergency response. Don't bother. Instead rely on SMS texting or other text-based communications--Twitter is a bit chaotic right now, but tweeting directly at someone isn't a bad way to get in touch. Email, iMessage, Facebook, BBM, GroupMe, and other app-based text communications would be a good solution as well.

If That Doesn't Work

There are lots of ways to track Bostonians right now. Google has, for the past few years, set up a "person finder" service that's sort of like a missed connections book during disasters. You can either inquire about someone specifically or list information you have about a person. It's barebones but works well, assuming whoever you're trying to find is tech-savvy enough to know to use it.

The Red Cross has a similar service, which you can find here, though the site isn't working for us right now.

If the person you're trying to find was a marathoner, it'd be a good idea to check the Boston Marathon's site first. Marathoners are equipped with RFID tags, and when they cross the line their position is automatically notched on the site. The explosions went off at peak finishing time, but there are thousands of runners who finished before that.

Foursquare is also, maybe for the first time in its history, potentially useful. If the person you're trying to find has checked in recently, that's a good sign. Check Twitter and Facebook, too; the person you're trying to find may have sent out a blast saying "I'm okay" through one of those services.

A few spreadsheets of spots to stay have also popped up, for runners who need a place to go now that travelling within Boston is difficult and not recommended. Here's one, and here's another.

An attack on the Boston Marathon has left at least two dead, according to reports. The Global Terrorism Database catalogues events like this, and has a record of eight other attacks or attempted attacks on or involving marathons. But out of those, only one was lethal.

An attack in Sri Lanka from a suicide bomber killed 14 civilians and the minister of highway and road development as he was signaling the start of a road marathon. 83 people were also injured. Of the other marathon attacks noted by the GTD (three in Northern Ireland and two in Pakistan), only two attacks resulted in any injuries. One in Pakistan caused four, and one in Bahrain caused three.

Full details aren't available on the attacks, but the majority of them were orchestrated bombings, happening from 1994 to the Sri Lanka attack in 2008. The targets were most often police, but two of the attacks, like the Boston Marathon bombing appears to be, were an attempt to harm private citizens.

[Global Terrorism Database]

A new bionic hand is the first to come with app control, allowing users to access complicated motion patterns-like the grip needed to play pool or right-click a mouse-with a single touchscreen tap.

The i-Limb Ultra Revolution, which has four individually powered fingers and a fully rotating thumb, can also be controlled directly by muscle signals from the wearer. The Biosim app works on the iPhone and the iPod Touch and comes with 24 preset motions and gestures, according to creator Touch Bionics. It also lets users create groups of grip patterns; for example, a wearer might create a "work" group that includes movements for mouse-clicking, paper-holding, and typing.

Because certain motions, like the three-finger tripod needed to pick up a pen, are difficult to master, the one-touch hand commands are a very useful addition to muscle-signal control. The app also comes with a training mode and a diagnostic mode to quickly check if the hand is functioning properly.

In what one researcher called "cellular alchemy," two different teams of scientists have reported transforming mouse and rat skin cells into brain cells of the type that's destroyed during multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and certain other disorders.

"We are taking a readily accessible and abundant cell and completely switching its identity to become a highly valuable cell for therapy," Paul Tesar, a geneticist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, said in a press release. "It's cellular alchemy."

The type of cell that the researchers made is a young, immature version of an oligodendrocyte. Oligodendrocytes normally wrap the nerve fibers of the brain and spinal cord in a protective coating called myelin. With certain diseases, though, people lose that coating or suffer damage to it, which can lead to severe symptoms, such as losing control of the arms and legs.

One major idea researchers have for curing such diseases is adding myelin back by transplanting young, immature oligodendrocytes into the patient. The cells are then supposed to mature and wrap themselves around exposed nerve fibers they find. (Older, more mature oligodendrocytes don't seem as prone to finding and sheathing exposed nerve fibers.) The idea has worked in lab animals genetically engineered to not have myelin-wohoo!-but there's a drawback. Until now, researchers generally made oligodendrocytes from stem cells taken from embryos. That's fine for mice and rats, but it's difficult to harvest and grow enough embryonic human stem cells for transplants in people.

These two new studies, bothpublished yesterday in the journal Nature Biotechnology, took a step in the right direction by transforming mouse or rat skin cells into immature oligodendrocytes. Both teams, one from Case Western Reserve and the other from Stanford University in California, fiddled with the genes that are active in the skin cells. Each team found three genes that were key to changing the identity of skin cells, although the teams did not find the exact same three genes: Two of the genes were the same between the two groups, but the groups used a different third gene.

Both teams put their transformed oligodendrocytes into petri dishes with nerve cells and into mice brains. The transformed oligodendrocytes created protective myelin sheaths, like they do in healthy nervous systems.

Synthetic marijuana carries the sort of junior-circuit connotation befitting a drug high-schoolers favor - pot's answer to the wine cooler. Then you read stories like that of Emily Bauer, a Houston-area teenager who suffered series of strokes that left her blind and paralyzed after she smoked some fake weed she bought at a gas station.

Over a matter of weeks in December she went from having migraines to falling into a daylong psychotic episode, and in January emerged from a medically induced coma with profound brain damage. Her stepfather told CNN: "I'd never have thought we'd be in this situation. If she had bought it off the street or from a corner, that's one thing, but she bought it from convenience store."

Her ordeal and others like it sound like real-life Reefer Madness, made all the weirder by the shady legality of it all. But what is synthetic cannabis, and can it really be that much more dangerous than regular weed?

As sold, synthetic cannabis comes as little pouches with brand names such as K-2 or Spice, full of tea-like dried herbs treated with chemicals that contain cannabinoid molecules. A 2009 thematic paper by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction lists three major categories of these compounds:

- The "classical cannabinoids," THC analogues based on a dibenzopyran ring, were developed in the 1960s. They include HU-210 (for "Hebrew University," where it was developed), and Nabilone and Dronabinol, which can be used to treat nausea after chemotherapy.

- The "non-classical cannabinoids," the cyclohexylphenol series developed by Pfizer in the 1970s. They include CP 59,540 and CP 47,497.

- The "JWH compounds," named for John W. Huffman of Clemson University, one of the scientists who created them in the 1990s. His and other labs developed them largely from organic compounds called indoles and pyrroles. Several of these molecules, too, have been shown to stimulate appetites and suppress nausea, for instance, and may have some benefits for sufferers of PTSD.

They've also been shown to get people good and high. Huffman, now an emeritus professor, has gone on record expressing resigned dismay that anyone would actually smoke the stuff. "These things are dangerous - anybody who uses them is playing Russian roulette," Huffman told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. "They have profound psychological effects. We never intended them for human consumption." (Weary of his notoriety, he declined to comment for this story.)

This spate of adverse events keeps any clinical trial from happening, because nobody wants to touch it.
Huffman wasn't surprised in 2009 when he first heard of people producing and selling synthetic cannabis. There are around 500 molecules in the family, and at least three of them are simple to produce: "You can make them in two steps from commonly available starting materials," he told the Times. He and other colleagues published a 2011 paper about synthetic cannabinoids entitled "Hijacking of Basic Research" that raised the specter of "another ecstasy-like problem" because "many hundreds of other compounds that could have cannabimimetic effects are not yet specifically regulated." />

When the "spice" products first went on the market about nine years ago, they had certain advantages to pot, especially for young users: They weren't illegal, they were easy to get and they didn't turn up in drug tests. But of course they also hadn't been used enough for people to understand the potential risks. In 2010, more than 11,000 American emergency room visits were tied to synthetic cannabinoids (to be fair, regular pot generated nearly 40 times that many). European countries started cracking down. The Drug Enforcement Agency followed suit, listing as Schedule I controlled substances five of the compounds, which can be an order of magnitude more potent than THC, the cannabinoid in marijuana, depending on how they bind to the brain's cannabinoid receptors. Even now, as labels of the stuff explicitly state that they're not for human consumption (i.e., an incense), reporters have found clerks who recommend smoking it.

Dr. H. Westley Clark, the director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, said that in determining which substances to regulate, the federal government tends to err on the side of personal freedom until thousands of people turn up in hospitals. In that regard, he said, 2010 was a tipping point for making synthetic marijuana a priority. That year the DEA moved to control five specific chemicals (including three JWHs) and various states began enacting their own bans, which are still spreading. Even now it doesn't seem too tough to find, though, when police are ballyhooing busts of drug dens with such nefarious names as Pleasant Avenue Wireless & Smoke Shop, Bonkerz and Sycamore Market.

Marijuana carries a compound shown to dampen the schizophrenia-like effects of THC. Not so with the synthetics.
"If the early marking says ‘Look, I've got this great drug, and it causes agitation, anxiety, nausea, vomiting, elevated blood pressure, seizures, hallucinations, paranoid behavior and makes you catatonic and nonresponsive' - what's the demand going to be?" Clark said. "With sufficient passage of time we discover all these other things. Now regulators need power."/>

Not only are the synthetics crazy strong, then, they also arrive in a vacuum. Multiple meta-studies of longitudinal studies have tied long-term marijuana use, especially from a young age, to increased incidence of chronic (no pun intended) psychosis. The risk remains "modest," according to this 2011 Current Psychiatry article on the connection between cannabinoids and psychosis. That may be in part because marijuana, at least, carries a compound called cannabidol shown to perhaps dampen the schizophrenia-like effects of THC. Not so with the synthetics. A U.K. survey last year found that 93 percent of people who had used both natural and synthetic marijuana preferred the old-fashioned plant, citing the harsh effects.

For the average user on the street, then, the effects of the synthetics are potentially nasty. Moreover, the precise chemicals and doses are unknown to users and responding physicians, said Dr. Joseph Pierre, the UCLA professor and schizophrenia expert who authored the Current Psychiatry article.

"They're marketed as ‘herbal' products, and people tend to equate ‘herbal' with ‘safe,'" Pierre said. "We live in a society where we're not used to expecting these things are going to cause a lot of harm." But along with the approximate effects of pot come some of its lesser-known risks, including arrhythmia, heart attacks and seizures. And medical literature has recorded nasty psychological effects - hallucinations, disorganized thoughts, paranoid delusions - increasingly among users who had no history of vulnerability to mental illness. "Some of the patients are becoming pretty floridly psychotic," Pierre said. "The last time I counted, there were more than 50 of those cases in the medical literature." In several of those, he said, the effects lasted weeks or months.

They were never intended for human consumption.
The military has already banned all similar compounds. Pierre said that with some 500 compounds to consider, the federal government might eventually issue a similar blanket ban beyond the scant five the DEA has listed. New Zealand booted 50 synthetic cannabinoids off the market late last year.

Meanwhile, Clark is concerned that the potential benefits of the synthetic cannabinoids stand to suffer from the association with drug scares. "Now that we've got this spate of adverse events, it keeps any clinical trial from happening," he said, "because nobody wants to touch it."

In 2007, my first year of working at Popular Science, we launched the Invention Awards, a celebration of dogged innovators everywhere, and gave one of the first to Leonard Duffy. His success until then had been limited to a cookbook stand, which sold for a time on QVC. Then, from his workshop in Vermont, he took a stab at updating the product that everyone wishes he or she had thought up: Velcro. His version, unflatteringly named the slidingly engaging fastener, was an interlocking patterned material that he used to make a breathable, waterproof replacement for a Velcro cast. We found him just as his material had won a NASA contest; today, it has evolved into 10 U.S. patents. I've always thought of him as the very model of what these awards are about. 

You might think that our media-saturated,
app-based culture is doing away with the inventive instinct, but the opposite is true.Since 2007, the process and products of invention have changed. Materials and tools are cheaper and more sophisticated. Amateurs with a $2,000 3-D printer can produce the sorts of prototypes only professionals with access to a machine costing tens of thousands of dollars could have created 10 years ago. And an idea need not take a physical form to have a worldwide impact. Ubiquitous platforms like smartphones are making coders, not welders, the new inventors. 

What's perhaps most transformative, however, is that today the passion of an inventor, captured in a personal appeal on the Internet, can be more than enough to bring in the investment capital he or she needs to get something going, via crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, RocketHub, and Indiegogo. While you might think that our media-saturated, app-based culture is doing away with the inventive instinct, those sites have revealed that the opposite is true. People who could never before afford to invent something suddenly have the means to make it happen.

That last factor has caused us to expand our celebration of amateur achievement. Beyond the 10 innovators you'll read about this month, we're also putting out a call for 50 scientists, thinkers, and makers who want to achieve something important but lack the capital to do it. We're going to give them a platform for soliciting seed money-a crowdgrant, we're calling it-from you, our audience. The first step is finding worthy entrants. If you're a bathtub geneticist, an amateur hydroelectric engineer, a weekend chemist, apply at popsci.com/crowdgrant for the chance to be one of the 50, and follow the #crowdgrant conversation on Twitter.

--Jacob Ward

jacob.ward@popsci.com | @_jacobward_

Go here to read the May issue of Popular Science.

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science.

Imagine you're just polishing off a glass of soda. Whatever liquid left in the straw makes that gurgling sound indicative that there's just nothing left in the glass to drink. Turns out, trees under drought stress make the same sad sound, and a few researchers hope they can use that acoustic signature to identify and save otherwise-doomed trees.

That trees make noise (beyond the delicate rustle of leaves in the wind) is no secret. But teasing out the specific physical phenomena that cause the various arboreal noises has eluded researchers. At the recent meeting of the American Physical Society, scientists from Grenoble University in France presented research that not only were they able to determine that drought-stressed trees make noise, they were also able to show exactly which process created the sound.

To really grok the research, it's helpful to understand how trees transport water. Trees draw ground water up through specialized tubes called xylem, relying on intermolecular forces between water molecules and themselves, and water molecules and the sides of the tubes, to create a single column of unbroken water in each xylem tube. But as groundwater dries up, the trees must pull harder on the remaining water; if the pressure is greater than the strength of the intermolecular forces, the column of water breaks and an air bubble forms. This process is called cavitation. Too many air bubbles can mean death for the tree.

To ensure that these air bubbles were the culprits behind the acoustic signature of drought-parched trees, the researchers mocked up a tree in the lab. They placed a thin piece of pine wood, complete with its xylem intact, into a capsule filled with a gel. As the researchers evaporated the water out of the gel -- a test "drought" -- they simultaneously recorded video and sound of the cavitation in the xylem. The researchers discovered that about half of the sounds made by a tree are due to cavitation, and that the process has its own unique acoustical signature. In the future, the researchers say, forest managers could use a hand-held acoustic device to identify water-stressed trees before permanent damage sets in.

Studio Roosegaarde, led by designer and vowel aficionado Daan Roosegaarde, is one of our favorites; we've previously followed the studio as it introduced "the Route 66 of the future," equipped with lights and warnings and pictures of snowflakes. PSFK had a talk with Roosegaarde about another undertaking, the Intimacy Project.

The Intimacy Project is concerned with "smart fabrics," essentially wearable gadgets that perform various functions. These fabrics can interact with light, sound, and electrical current and seem mostly concerned with becoming transparent or opaque. According to Roosegaarde, this is accomplished with "electrically-sensitive foils," though there's no additional information as to how they work.

Previous coverage of the Intimacy Project only showed the sexy women's wear, which makes a statement about...something...by turning transparent when hit with a powerful beam of light (like, say, a photographer's flash). They can also change according to how "excited" the wearer is. But Roosegaarde cheekily notes in the PSFK video that the team is also working on menswear--a business suit that turns transparent when the wearer lies. Lie detection is actually fairly well-suited to clothing; polygraph tests, the most commonly used form of lie detection, rely on bodily functions like perspiration and heart rate, which could be easily measured with clothing that rests against the skin.

[via PSFK]

Remember last week when PopSci told you about a "people's choice" contest to name the planet orbiting the Alpha Centauri star system? And the International Astronomical Union had cried foul, saying the paid contest had no bearing on the names? Well, it's not really that simple. You can call a star or a planet whatever you want, and even pay to nominate your favorite; it just might not matter to anyone else.

Here's the story: Last fall, astronomers spotted a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, the nearest star system to our own. This was exciting for a lot of astronomers, fans of science fiction and members of the public, for whom the Alpha Centauri system looms large in the imagination. So this spring, a space education company called Uwingu (it means "sky" in Swahili) started a contest to ask people for a name, something more exciting than Alpha Centauri Bb. You can pay $4.99 to nominate a planetary appellation, or pay $0.99 to vote. The top three are Caleo, Rakhat and Amara--the last of which is the name of some guy's fiance, proposed in her honor.

The thing is, the contest winner will not be the planet's officially recognized astronomical name, used by professional astronomers in their research papers, noted in textbooks and otherwise lofted into the scientific canon. It won't have the weight of an official title like Jupiter, for instance.

There is no official list, book of names or other registry of exoplanet titles and designations. There's not even an official list of star names--there are many celestial catalogs, each recording the same stars and giving them different names. Astronomers use general guidelines according to the catalog they're using, and the IAU unofficially recognizes these.

"There's definitely a place for popular names and informal names; sometimes they can make it into the literature, like maybe a well-known star like Polaris," said astronomer Jason T. Wright of Penn State, an exoplanet researcher and blogger. "I know a lot of people are concerned that opening it up to popular names could lead to more confusion, but I am neutral. I think it's great if people get really interested in exoplanets."

The IAU, which is an international organization of astronomers who agree on things like names of celestial objects, last week pointed out (rather pointedly) that Uwingu's contest is technically meaningless. The IAU said it and its members are the sole arbiters of these things, and Uwingu voters will not christen the planet in the global astronomical record. But neither will the IAU, at least not until it drafts some new rules. That was unclear from their own statement, and Uwingu, Wright and others took issue with that.

The IAU does not even have an officially recognized definition for exoplanets, Wright pointed out. The IAU does define certain things, most famously PLANET--as in one located in this solar system--which led to the demotion of now dwarf planet Pluto. It also operates committees that agree on accepted names for locations on Mars and on the moon.

"The Uwingu project in question does not promise ‘rights to name exoplanets.' It is compiling a database of names that astronomers, including those in charge of nomenclature at the IAU, might use to name exoplanets," Wright wrote on his blog.

Uwingu is operated by several prominent astronomers, including Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, a major proponent of crowdsourcing and also the chief investigator on the New Horizons mission to non-planet Pluto. And although the current contest has no bearing on final names, there is certainly precedent for this sort of thing. In our solar system, planets and their moons are named after Roman and related Greek gods, but not initally: Have you ever heard of George's Star? William Herschel chose this name (the Latin version is Georgium Sidus) for Uranus, after he discovered the planet in 1781. He wanted to honor his patron, King George III. (The name didn't stick.)

Wright said he would prefer the IAU clarify what it has and hasn't done about naming planets, but he doesn't think there's a need for an official exoplanet designation process. Astronomers generally follow an unofficial scheme, recognized by the IAU, of designating planets with an alphabetical system based on the name of their star. The star is technically the first member of the system, so there's no planet "a." For instance, the star Kepler-22 has an Earth-sized planet orbiting it, and its name is Kepler-22b. The star HD40307 is accompanied by planets HD40307 b, c, d (probably e and f) and g, and so on throughout the cosmos.

"A designation follows some scheme to name them all according to a catalog, so that no matter what you find in the future, your designation can accommodate it," Wright explained. "Stars can have names and technical designations."

Like, for instance, Polaris. Everyone has seen the brightest star in the Little Dipper, one of the brightest in the night sky. To most North Americans, it's just the North Star. It's also known as the Lodestar or the Guiding Star. In astronomical catalogs it's HD8890, or FK5 907, or HIP 11767, or α Ursa Minoris, and so on. All of these names refer to the same thing.

And so it could be with Alpha Centauri Bb. If you want to vote, for a lark, you can do it here.

When David Nichols earned a Ph.D in medicinal chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1973 by studying psychedelics, he thought he would continue studying hallucinogens indefinitely. "I thought I would work on it for the rest of my life," he says.

His timing was less than fortuitous. In 1970, the year after Nichols started grad school, Richard Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, designed to clamp down on the manufacture and distribution of drugs in the U.S. The act classified hallucinogenic substances like LSD, DMT, psilocybin (the psychedelic alkaloid in mushrooms) and mescaline as Schedule I substances--the most restrictive use category, reserved for drugs with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Marijuana was also placed in this category, and 15 years later when ecstasy came onto the scene, MDMA was emergency-classified as a Schedule I substance as well. By contrast, cocaine, opium and morphine are Schedule II substances, meaning they can be prescribed by a doctor.

Despite some promising results from trials of psychedelics in treating alcoholism, psychiatric conditions and modeling mental illness, by the early '70s, the government had tightened control of Schedule I substances, even for research. It's only now that we're starting to return to the notion that these drugs could be medicine.

If you wanted to kill your career, you did research on psychedelics.
Starting in the early '90s, and as more scientists prove it's feasible, increasingly in the lastdecade, researchers have been approved to conduct clinical trials with human subjects, and there are promising results showing that substances like MDMA could be useful in treating depression and curing PTSD, and that classical psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD could be a way to soothe anxiety in the terminally ill, treat alcoholism and more. But it's still far from an easy field to break into.

In 1938, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD for the first time while studying ergots, a type of fungus. Though the pharmaceutical company that he worked for, Sandoz, didn't have any interest in the compound, Hofmann found himself inexplicably drawn to it. Five years later, in the spring of 1943, he synthesized it again, noticing that it seemed to have unusual properties: After accidentally absorbing small amounts through his fingertips one day in the lab, Hofmann had to leave work early, under the effects of what he called "a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition." A few days later, he experimented with taking what he thought was a small dose of LSD, about 250 micrograms (a common dose now is more on the order of 100 micrograms), and proceeded to trip out of his mind, an experience he describes in his book LSD: My Problem Child.

Thinking that it could have medical uses, Hofmann and fellow researchers at Sandoz research laboratories began testing LSD in animals, and in 1947, the first paper looking at psychiatric LSD use in was published. Researchers saw in acid the potential to model psychotic disorders in healthy brains--a way for psychiatrists to induce in themselves the kinds of sensations their patients experienced as a result of mental illness. It could also be a way to break down boundaries, freeing the mind so patients could open up in psychotherapy.

Despite its current reputation, LSD wasn't just for the Beatles and California hippies, it was seen as "an invaluable weapon to psychiatrists," as Time magazine called it in 1955. Research varied widely in legitimacy, but LSD was tested on an estimated 40,000 people around the world between 1950 and 1963.

The CIA saw insidious potential in LSD: They thought it could be a route to mind control.
In 1953, a pair of Canadian researchers tried to use high doses of LSD to scare alcoholics into sobriety, but discovered it instead produced a kind of mystical, near-religious experience for them that convinced them to stop drinking. They were onto something: A 2012 meta-analysis of LSD-alcoholism trials found though many of the trials from the late 1960s were too small to produce statistically-viable results on their own, in conjunction, they showed consistent, positive results.

At the same time, the government was also dipping its toes in an acid-filled pool. The CIA saw a more insidious potential in LSD: They thought it could be a truth serum or a route to mind control. Josef Mengele and other Nazi doctors had experimented on concentration camp prisoners with mescaline and other psychotropic drugs.In the midst of Cold War paranoia, the U.S. Navy thought mescaline could be used to get people to reveal information against their will. When the experiments ultimately proved unsuccessful, the government turned to Albert Hofmann's new wonder drug, already beginning to emerge as a psychiatric juggernaut.

/>

Between 1953 and 1964, in a project called MKULTRA, the CIA experimented with LSD on unwitting civilians, prisoners, government employees and even its own agents, in a manner that Senator Edward Kennedy later described to Congress as making "little scientific sense." It came to the point where "surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives," as Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain describe in Acid Dreams.

The agents monitoring the experiments weren't scientists, and at least one person died after jumping out of a window under the influence of LSD. By the time the Senate held hearings on MKULTRA in 1977, many documents related to the operation had been destroyed on the orders of then-CIA Director Richard Helms in 1973.

Disturbed by the CIA's abuses, Congress restricted the use of hallucinogens like LSD to scientific research in 1965. By that point, the tide was already turning against psychedelics, in part due to unethical behavior (referred to by one contemporary researcher as "excessive enthusiasm") by some of the scientists studying them. Timothy Leary, a psychologist and the psychedelic advocate of "Turn on, tune in, drop out" fame," lost his appointment at Harvard University in 1963 due to the administration's concerns that he and other Harvard Psilocybin Project researchers were sloppy in their scientific approach, even conducting investigations under the influence of psilocybin themselves, and after giving an undergraduate student psilocybin off-campus.

Political motives, too, added to the pressure to halt hallucinogenic research like Leary's, even though it had been surprisingly successful in some aspects, like in reducing prisoner recidivism with psilocybin. LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelics were playing a vital role in a rising countercultural movement, as the forthcoming Albert Hofmann biography Mystic Chemist points out. They were agents of peace and love in a time when the government desperately needed soldiers for the Vietnam War, a war young people were increasingly refusing to serve in. In 1966 the U.S., soon followed by the rest of the world, made LSD illegal. Even the most promising psychedelic research slowed, and by the mid-70s, stopped.

This was the world David Nichols faced when he emerged from his Ph.D. program brandishing a dissertation on psychedelic drugs. "If you wanted to kill your research career in academics, you did research on psychedelics," Nichols remembers. To some extent, that's still true, because psychedelic research remains difficult to fund. As a distinguished professor at Purdue University, Nichols received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for 30 years to look into how exactly how these drugs work in the body. But since the organization concentrates specifically on stopping drug use, he couldn't study their potential medical properties.

As psychiatrist Charles Grob wrote in a 1994 article in the Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness:

In the early '90s, Nichols was at a scientific meeting telling a story he had told a million times: It's too bad there's not any clinical research, research with human subjects, with psychedelics. "You could do it, but you need private money." He decided he could find that private money, even though he didn't have the medical degree necessary to do clinical research himself. Along with Grob and others, he founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to do legitimate, rigorous scientific research on psychedelics.

For many years when the FDA got a protocol to study psychedelics in humans, they just put it on a shelf somewhere.
Grob, a professor at the UCLA Medical School, was one of the first researchers to get FDA approval to conduct a research study on the therapeutic effects of psychedelics since research had slowed to a halt 35 years earlier. He was interested in using psilocybin (a drug with less political baggage than LSD or even MDMA) to ease the anxieties and depression in cancer patients with limited life expectancy.

So what changed? According to Nichols, now an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, there wasn't an abrupt change in regulations, but just a slow shift in attitudes. "For many years when [the FDA] got a protocol to study psychedelics in humans, they just put it on a shelf somewhere."

Animal-based research went on, because the government was still interested in figuring out how these chemicals functioned, but "the presumption was that was impossible to do with humans," according to Mark Geyer, another Heffter Research Institute founder who has been studying the basic neuroscience of psychedelics on animals for almost 30 years with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Even if the FDA had been willing to approve psychedelic trials with humans, there probably weren't many applications being submitted, because researchers assumed it couldn't be done.

"The goal wasn't to stop scientists, the goal was to stop street use… but the side effect of that was that even legitimate research was curtailed," Geyer explains. "It turns out, as I understand… there was no law on the books that forbade such research."

According to Nichols, sometime in the early '90s, a turnover in leadership loosened the agency's attitude toward human-based trials with psychedelics. After years of lobbying the federal government for permission, psychiatrist Rick Strassman was able to do a study with human subjects of the psychedelic compound DMT.

"Legitimate human research with hallucinogenic drugs, although of great theoretical and practical interest, involves daunting regulatory hurdles that have discouraged investigators from attempting such work," Strassman complained in a 1991 article for the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. Nevertheless, his study, involving 60 volunteers and hundreds of doses of DMT, didn't bring the world crashing around the FDA's ears, opening up the possibility that the agency might approve more clinical trials with psychedelics.

With the Heffter Research Institute, Grob designed and received FDA approval for a small trial to administer psilocybin to 12 terminal cancer patients between 30 and 60 years old. The patients came in for two sessions a month apart -- but everyone received a dose of psilocybin at one of the two sessions. "We didn't feel it was ethical to deny anyone the active treatment because they had limited life expectancy," Grob explains.

Because it was the first study to use psilocybin in decades, the FDA approved a very low dosage for the study. "People were not floridly hallucinating," according to Grob, but the effect was instead more like a waking dream. After a six-month follow-up, the subjects showed a significant, lasting reduction in anxiety. The study paved the way for other research into using psilocybin to ease end-of-life anxieties at Johns Hopkins University and NYU.

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Though Strassman proved clinical research to be both legal and possible, it's still not an easy process for scientists. That's part of the reason groups like the Heffter Research Institute and the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) exist: They have the resources and the motivation to wade through seemingly endless bureaucratic hurdles to move studies forward. The Heffter Research Institute can advise a researcher on what has worked in previous trials, and they provide a peer-review process for proposals. If their protocol is approved, the organization seeks private funding for it.

"It takes years to get all the approvals," as Grob says. His first study took a particularly long time to receive approval, though now that multiple studies have established safety parameters and feasibility for these types of trials, the process is somewhat smoother.

You have to really want to work with hallucinogens.
For studies involving people, not only does the research have to be approved by the university's institutional review board, as do most clinical trials, but it also has to be approved by the FDA and the researcher must be licensed to store and work with the drug by the DEA. The DEA requires intense security when it comes to storing the drugs, lest any resourceful college student try to relieve your lab of its drugs, and the licenses are specifically issued to one researcher in one lab--if you move rooms, you'll have to get the DEA's approval.

In clinical work, the drugs have to be manufactured in a specific pharmaceutical-grade manner to ensure quality. Though there aren't the same manufacturing standards, you also need the same Schedule I license to work with animals as you do with humans, even though less than one human dose of MDMA, for example, could supply a study with hundreds of mice.

"You have to really want to work with these," says Nichols, whose lab at Purdue made much of the clinical-grade hallucinogens for other researchers' trials. "Anybody who's a good chemist could probably do it, but there's no money in it."

Currently, according to the DEA, it takes about 9 months to get FDA and DEA approval for a license to research Schedule I substances, though researchers are a little more skeptical. "The DEA's not in a hurry to grant these licenses," according to Nichols.

Only 349 scientists have them, and that number is on the downswing: Three years ago, there were 550 licenses in the U.S. Nichols suggests that this could be a result of the DEA cracking down on researchers with extraneous licenses. In the past, Schedule I licenses had been renewed on a yearly basis without much fuss, but in recent years the agency has required Nichols to submit his current protocol and justify why he still needs the license.

Part of the problem with studying psychedelics--and other illicit drugs, such as marijuana--for medical use, is simply that they're not high-tech, and no pharmaceutical company needs or wants to get involved. There's no money in it for them. Though drugs like LSD and psilocybin are relatively easy to make in the lab, as MAPS founder Rick Doblin pointed out in a 2012 interview, "psychedelics are off-patent, can't be monopolized, and compete with other psychiatric medications that people take daily."

"My colleagues say to me, in these days of nanotechology and targeted therapy, what are you doing?" says Donald Abrams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has done research on medical marijuana. "We live in the 21st century. Studying plants as medicine is not where most investigators are putting their money."

And without the outside funding to continue researching, a scientist's career goes nowhere, so even fewer scientists want to get involved.

Organizations like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS are funded by private donors and don't have the money to do the expensive, large-scale human trials that could show sound results one way or the other. Nichols hopes that federal funding will be available to do larger studies with psychedelics sometime in the next decade, if the ongoing smaller trials can show efficacy. "There's movement toward accepting the possibility that these [psychedelic substances] are useful and not all that dangerous," he says.

The stigma persists, though. "It's still harder for somebody to get involved in psychedelic research, in terms of professionally and funding," says MAPS communications director Brad Burge.

And although psychedelic research has made some headway in England and Switzerland, roadblocks against psychedelic research exist abroad, too. The first clinical trial using psilocybin to treat depression stalled in early April because U.K. regulations require drugs used in clinical trials to be made under strict Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards, and the researchers, from Imperial College London, have been unable to find a company to manufacture psilocybin at that standard.

"The law for the control of drugs like psilocybin as a Schedule 1 Class A drug makes it almost impossible to use them for research," Nutt said in a press statement. "The reason we haven't started the study is because finding companies who could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the license, which can take up to a year and triple the price, is proving very difficult. The whole situation is bedeviled by this primitive, old-fashioned attitude that Schedule 1 drugs could never have therapeutic potential, and so they have to be made impossible to access."

There's a growing generation of students and researchers who aren't scared of studying the drugs.Yet despite the hurdles, for some researchers, the potential to cure some of our most troubling woes--like alcoholism, depression and PTSD--make the headaches of doing legitimate psychedelic science worthwhile. Later this week, around 1600 scientists from around the world devoted to this research will descend upon Oakland, Calif. to attend Psychedelic Science 2013, a three-day conference put on in part by MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute.

As Burge notes, the stigma that has haunted psychedelic science could be changing as a new generation of scientists arrive on the scene. "There's a generation of researchers and therapists that worked in the 1960s and '70s," he says, "but also there's this huge and growing generation of students and researchers who aren't scared of studying the drugs...looking for treatments to our most debilitating epidemics."

In the wake of a highly publicized series of brutalrapes in India, a group of engineering students devised a way to help women deter sexual assault: Make their underwear a weapon.

Manisha Mohan, a 20-year-old student at SRM University in Chennai, developed an undergarment called the "Society Harnessing Equipment," or SHE, with two of her friends in response to the December gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi.

The white nightgown's bra area is lined with pressure sensors calibrated to differentiate between more violent actions like squeezing, pinching or grabbing as opposed to say, hugging. Women can switch the garment on when they feel they might be unsafe. If the pressure sensor is activated, SHE sends a 3800kv electric shock through the garment, up to 82 times. The wearer is insulated from the shock by a polymer lining on the inner side.

It's also designed to alert others of the danger by sending a text message to a family member or friend and to the police with the wearer's GPS location.

The team is still working out a few kinks, like figuring out how to make it machine washable, and Mohan told the BBC they'd like to make the electronics smaller and link them to a smartphone app through Bluetooth.

"My vision is to see every women [sic] walking confidently on the streets in all parts of the world, even at odd hours," Mohan told the BBC.

[The Daily Beast]

Scientists have built a better bandage that'll stick to you like a leech. Literally. The new prototype adhesive bandage sticks even to wet skin, using a technique inspired by a parasitic worm that attaches itself to the insides of its hosts' intestines. Yum.

In the future, for certain surgeries, the bandage could replace stitches, staples and adhesive tapes that are already on the market, the bandage's inventors wrote in a paper they published today in the journal Nature Communications. Compared to sutures and staples, the bandage is quicker and easier to use, and it sticks better than other tapes, they wrote. In addition, its surface of small spines could inject drugs into the skin, they said.

The inventing team, including researchers from universities and hospitals in the Boston area, got their inspiration from a worm that infects freshwater fish. The worm, Pomphorhynchus laevis, has a spine-covered proboscis on top of its head. The body part looks a bit like a small cactus. When it infects a fish, the worm plunges its proboscis into the fish's intestinal wall, and then, using muscles, plumps up the "cactus," giving it a firm grip inside the fish's tissue.

The new bandage is covered with a neat array of tiny spines made of a special combination of plastics. The spines are normally stiff and easily pierce the skin. Once the spines contact water inside the skin, however, they plump, locking themselves inside the skin. In experiments done on pigs, the bandage held 3.5 times better than surgical staples.

Although this pierce-and-plump method sounds painful, the new bandage actually damages the skin minimally because the spines are small and don't penetrate into the skin very far, the Boston team wrote. Removing the bandage also is minimally damaging compared to other surgical stitching techniques, they said.

[Brigham and Women's Hospital via EurekAlert]

Professional reviewers have been positive about Facebook Home, the Android skin/launcher that turns your phone's homescreen into a sort of portal for Facebook photos and messages. The reviews almost exclusively come to the same conclusion, saying things like, "if you're a Facebook fanatic, you'll love Facebook Home." And yet it's simultaneously described as a flop. There are a billion Facebook users. How can this app, which is entirely designed to give you more Facebook, be a flop?

At the time of writing, the Facebook Home app has a 2.3 rating (out of 5) on the Google Play store. That's a worse rating than an app that turns your phone into a "Hello My Name Is" sticker, so it seems fair to say the public response to Facebook Home has not been particularly positive.

As BuzzFeed's John Herrman articulated well here, the problem is that those "Facebook fanatics" the reviewers are so sure will love this phone don't really exist anymore. Teens, who made Facebook what it is, all have Facebook, but they don't interact with it to the degree they used to, according to a recent Piper Jaffray survey. They spend less time on Facebook than ever before--it's something that exists, but as a utility, not something they're passionate about. It hasn't been embraced by the older generation, either; there's already LinkedIn, which is mostly a "grownup" version of Facebook. Rusty Foster summed it up (on Twitter, no less) this way: "Young people think FB is for the olds. Old people think it's for teens. No one thinks 'Facebook is for people like me.'"

I searched through social networks, search engines, reviews both professional and amateur, trying to find someone, anyone, who legitimately likes Facebook Home and finds that it suits their mobile lifestyle. It was pretty much futile. The reviews on Google Play are littered with thoughts from the Android tinkerers; they want to try out any alternative launcher, especially a free one, because why not? They'll try anything. They mostly write things like "It seems to work fine for what it is" and "I guess if i was a facebook-holic id be more excited about it but im not" [sic]. There are plenty of 5-star reviews, but they are almost exclusively either vague "Great job Facebook!" comments or compliments for the aesthetics of the app--most of whom note that they, too, won't be using it.

Commenter Dan Reichert wrote, "this is by far the best Android product facebook as produced. Unfortunately I will not be using it as my life doesn't come close enough to revolve so much around facebook. It's definitely a solid app though." That's the equivalent of the professional reviewers saying that those who love Facebook will love Facebook Home--but they don't, nor do they really know anyone who does.

Here's who loves Facebook Home:

1: Advertisers

Business Insider spoke to a few advertising execs, who misguidedly adore Facebook Home. Advertisers love Zuckerberg's pitch: More user engagement for "Facebook addicts," clicking more stories, spending more time looking at photos and reading status updates. Advertisers will be able to insert ads into Facebook Home--ads were part of the original pitch--and get more eyeballs on their ads.

2: Google

Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, loves Facebook Home. Sort of. He gave a speech during the All Things D conference in which he talked about Facebook Home in terms that made it seem as though Google was permitting the launcher rather than in love with it. Facebook had "read the rules and adhered to them," he said, not exactly a ringing endorsement. His moment of actual enthusiasm came later. "I think it's a tremendous endorsement of the [Android] platform," he said. "And what you can do with it."

3: Mark Zuckerberg

In an interview with Wired, Zuckerberg noted that he'd "love" Facebook Home to move outside of Android to other mobile operating systems like Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone. "I think people really care about Facebook," he said. "In a lot of ways, this is one of the best Facebook experiences that you can get."

Aaaaaand...that's it. The people who love Facebook Home aren't Facebook fanatics or Facebook addicts or Facebookaholics. They're people with a vested financial interest in the success of the app. And that doesn't bode well for its success; it doesn't matter if they like it. It matters if we like it.

When the United States ratified the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, Popular Science celebrated the end of Prohibition by getting completely wasted (probably) and publishing this lovely infographic on how to make beer. "With the removal of national restrictions against the manufacture and sale of beer, American brewers are again in action," said our June 1933 issue. "Their operations represent one of the most extensive applications of modern industrial chemistry."

Brewing beer hasn't changed much in 80 years (and Popular Sciencestill loves drinking it.) View the larger version of the infographic to see how the newly legal brewers turned barley into tasty, tasty beer.

Read "Beer Making Is Marvel of Industrial Chemistry" in our June 1933 issue.

This article originally appeared on PopSci.com on December 13, 2012.

Oregon lawmakers in the House just voted 58-0 to approve its new state microbe. If the state Senate also approves, Oregon will boast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the humble ale yeast, as its unicellular avatar. It makes sense: according to Mark Johnson, the bill's sponsor, the craft brewing business brings Oregon some $2.4 billion in revenues each year.

Contrary to reports you'll read elsewhere, Oregon is not the first state attempt to have its own microbe. That honor goes to Wisconsin. In 2010, lawmakers in the state Assembly tried to elevate Lactococcus lactis, the bacteria used to make buttermilk and cheese, to official state microbe. But the apparently narrow-minded or scientifically incompetent Wisconsin state Senate did not embrace the measure, and so the L. lactis bill languished. Recalcitrant politicians are why Wisconsinites can't have nice things, but let's hope that the Oregonian variety is a bit more enterprising. (It should be noted that Hawaiian lawmakers have also proposed two different, rare microbes to represent Hawaii, but neither have been made official, either.)

While researching this story, I found an interesting letter to Microbe magazine from two microbiologists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, on the topic. The authors mused that while Wisconsin (and now Oregon) have positive microbes associated with them, efforts by microbiologists to give other states their own microbes are up against some unsavory characters.

If one were to choose a microbe historically associated with a state (due to it being discovered there or to its prevalence in the region) Montana would likely end up with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (Rickettsia rickettsii), Louisiana would get Hansen's Disease, aka leprosy, (Mycobacterium leprae), Connecticut would inherit Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi) and Nevada would merit gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae). In 2010, another wag suggested certain cities should get their own microbe, and nominated Clostridium botulinum, the unicellular producer of face-freezing Botox, for Los Angeles.