SpaceX tweeted this photo today showing its Dragon capsule berthed to the International Space Station. Earth is beautiful every day, and you can't beat a view like this.

NASA has lots of views just like it. Along with their beauty, they can also tell us something about how we are changing our planet. The space agency celebrates Earth Month, not just Earth Day, and you can see some more amazing Earth-from-space views on its Earth Month page.

Happy Earth Day!

Good work by the research team at the University of Gothenburg, which has a bright future as respectable-looking, labcoat-wearing con men if this whole science thing doesn't work out. The three-person team gave phones with Instagram to a bunch of people at a museum and watched what they did with them.

The findings: people used those phones to take pictures and upload them via Instagram.

It seems that the study was motivated by a perception in "the media" (who are these people??? Am I one of them? I don't think I've suggested anything of the sort!) that Instagram is a "trivial pastime" "used to post mostly of self-portraits and pictures of food [sic]." This sort of photography is classified as "shallow" in addition to "trivial."

And yet, the study found that in a natural history museum, people took pictures of things in the natural history museum! The study did not strategically lay plates of eggs Benedict around the museum to see if the subjects would choose to take shots of food over shots of stuffed weasels, but despite this glaring oversight, did find that the pictures were the result of "a lot of effort," according to Ph.D student and aspiring grifter Beata Jungselius.

"The study also indicates that smart phones have changed the way we share our experiences," reads the press release.

Okay.

[Press Release]

Brazil's Comandante Ferraz Antarctic Station, a permanent research base operated by the country's Navy, was destroyed by a fire in February 2012. Architectural firm Triptyque Arquitetura entered this design as a potential replacement, and although it took second place, it still looks amazing.

It's a modular building, with with a core space branching out to different pods organized by their functions. It's all supported on stilts, for minimal environmental impact. According to the firm:

Great. But can it ski?

[Arch Daily]

When North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb underground in February, seismic researchers knew right away. The nuclear test shook the ground like a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, and in an area not known for natural quakes.

Now, the results are coming in from further tests that seek to learn more about North Korea's nuclear capabilities.

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization has picked up radioactive gases at monitoring stations hundreds of miles away from North Korea, the commission announced today. The commission found two radioactive isotopes of xenon, xenon-131m and xenon-133. The gases appeared at a station in Takasaki, Japan, in a ratio that's consistent with their coming from a nuclear fission reaction in North Korea 50 days ago, the commission said. The North Korea nuclear test occurred 55 days before the gases showed up in Takasaki on April 9.

The CTBTO first said it had found xenon isotopes in the air in February, but then retracted the finding because there wasn't enough evidence linking those isotopes to North Korea. The commission seems more sure now, although commission scientists are still working to eliminate alternate explanations for the xenon measurements, such as releases from nuclear power plants. So far, they haven't found any evidence of other possible xenon sources, CTBTO researcher Mika Nikkinen said in a statement.

The seismic measurements that the CTBTO, the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies made right after the North Korean test gave them a rough estimate of the power of the bomb. (It could have been anywhere from 4.6 kilotons to 11.7 kilotons, Columbia University seismologists reported. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ranged between 15 and 20 kilotons.)

Radionuclide measurements like these can tell researchers much more. Ratios of xenon isotopes can sometimes indicate whether the source was a uranium or plutonium driven reaction, Nature News reported February 12, but the CTBTO hasn't been able to determine this from the Takasaki measurements, Nikkinen said in a YouTube video from the CTBTO.

Investment bankers raking in the dough on Wall Street may get a bad rap for being selfish, but a desire to make boatloads of money won't automatically turn you into Scrooge McDuck, according to new research. A study published in the April issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that many people primarily driven by a desire for wealth are still willing to help someone in need.

Previous research has shown the people are more likely to help others if they aren't in a hurry, and might be less likely to help others if they love money. Yet in a recent experiment with a group of 50 wealth-driven college students in an intro economics course at Loyola University, mostly business majors, 78 percent displayed a willingness to stop and lend assistance to someone in trouble regardless of whether they were in a hurry.

First, the students filled out a questionnaire measuring their religiosity and desire for wealth. Later, they were given one of two passages to read--either one about career paths for economics students or a version of the parable of the Good Samaritan. They were asked to go down the hall to another room where they would give a short speech related to the passage they had read. Some were told they were running late and the researcher in the other room would be waiting on them, while others were told they didn't need to rush.

On their way to the other room, the participants encountered someone in distress who would approach the subject and explain that his cell phone had just died and one of his family members had been in an accident. The "victim" would rank each student's helpfulness on a scale from 0 to 5--from not noticing or offering them any help to indirectly helping by telling the waiting research assistant about the situation to providing them with a cell phone or money for a pay phone.

After the students proceeded to the room and gave the speech, they answered a questionnaire about how likely they would be to help someone in need, whether they would participate in insider trading if they could get away with it and receive $2 million, and whether accumulating material wealth was one of their major goals in life.

The majority of the participants offered some form of aid to the victim, either directly or indirectly. Only 22 percent (11 people) did not help at all, and 66 percent stayed with the victim and/or gave them a cell phone to use.

Helpful, but these people weren't angels: the authors write "the preliminary data suggests the majority of the participants were somewhat ethically challenged." A little more than half (56 percent) admitted they would take the $2 million for insider trading, and 72 percent said accumulating wealth was a top life priority.

Whether or not they were in a hurry didn't seem to significantly affect the students' altruism: 84 percent of the low-hurry group stopped to help, whereas 72 percent stopped in the high-hurry group. Which passage the students had been given to read didn't affect the outcome either.

Whether the subject was intrinsically motivated by religion did predict helping behavior: those with intrinsic religious motivation (those who viewed religion as an end in itself rather than a means to an end) were 13 times more likely to help compared to a subject without intrinsic motivation (like those who viewed religion as a means to an end, motivated by social status or peer approval).

"The source of intrinsic motivation arises from following religious tradition, which calls for altruism and self-sacrifice," writes author Michael Babula, a senior lecturer in quantitative techniques at the University of Greenwich. "The significant finding offers an upbeat note that wealth-driven individuals in this sample may possess the Samaritan-like mindset."

Great, so it's possible to be both a rich investment banker and a good person. But is anyone else worried about how many of these business majors would consider insider trading?

[via BPS Research Digest]

Scientists recently located two exoplanets orbiting in the Kepler-62 star system 1,200 light years from Earth. Though much further away than other exoplanets possibly conducive to life-Gliese 581g is only 20 light years from us--Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are the smallest exoplanets the Kepler Mission has detected in their star's "goldilocks zone." And for habitability, size matters. Kepler-62e, in particular, has a radius only 60 percent larger than Earth's, meaning that if it is a rocky planet like Earth it might have a similar mass. With a similar mass (meaning similar gravity) and an atmosphere, Kepler-62e could have life as we know it. In fact, Kepler-62e now tops the charts for potential habitable exoplanets.

Because of its promising position in the star system, Kepler-62e is a prime candidate for our continuing search for life. Something amazing could be living its deserts or oceans. But could you? What would a day be like for an Earthling on Kepler-62e?

Length of year: 122 Days

Radius: 1.61 times that of Earth's

Estimated maximum mass: 36 times that of Earth's

Estimated minimum mass (based on a rocky composition): 4 times that of Earth's

Number of birthdays a child born on Kepler-62e would have every five Earth years: 15

Percentage you'd have to add to your road trips to cover a proportional distance on Earth: 61 percent

Amount of G-force equivalent to prepare for: 1.5-14Gs

Ways to prepare:
•Ride a seriously scary roller coaster
•Take off in a Saturn V rocket
•Cover 0.25 miles over 4.4 seconds in a drag racer.
•Slam on the brakes in a Formula One car.
•Set the world record for speed in Olympic luge.
•Pull out of a dive in a F-16.
•Explosively eject from your seat in a fighter jet.

Automatic weight gain on Kepler-62e: 50 to 1300 percent

Amount of weight the average person can expect gravity to add: Between 90 pounds and two full-grown dairy cows

Kyle Hill is a science writer who specializes in finding the secret science in your favorite fandom. Hill also contributes to Scientific American, Wired, Nature Education, and io9. He writes daily at his Science-Based Life blog, and you can follow him on Twitter under @Sci_Phile.

About an hour ago, the Associated Press's official Twitter account, @AP, issued this tweet (it's since been removed):

I was in the bathroom reading Twitter (I know.) when this first broke, and the first thing I saw wasn't one of the most respected news sources in the world tweeting that the White House had been bombed. I don't follow the AP on my personal account, so the first thing I saw was this:

i certainly hope so RT @atavistian: Looks like @ap's been hacked.

— Mike Isaac (@MikeIsaac) April 23, 2013

The next three tweets I saw about this possibly breaking news story were as follows: "there's no way that @AP tweet is real," "Not believing this," and "h a c k t i m e." Not a single person in my feed believed the tweet; the closest was Anil Dash asking for "other sources." The jokes followed immediately--jokes about those who had bungled coverage of the Boston Bombing (the New York Post, CNN, former Reuters social media editor Matthew Keys, Reddit), and then aggressive ignoring of the tweet. My feed, largely made up of reporters, editors, writers, and other news-types, barely even bothered to make a reasoned rejection, so silly was the AP tweet and so jaded our reaction to news.

That's the same experience everyone had; within seconds, the balance of those talking about the tweet swung from earnest disbelief to cries of "hacked," "fake," and scorn. By five minutes in--an eternity on Twitter!--the conversation was almost entirely about the "AP hack," not the "news." Even the stock market, run by alarmist algorithms, snapped back from an absurd drop in minutes.

The Syrian Electronic Army, a largely unknown group which claimed credit for the hack, has been busy the past few days, taking control of the Twitter accounts of NPR, the BBC, @60Minutes, and more. But they're small-h hackers, nominally political and apparently accomplished at getting access but less concerned with causing real damage than in pranks and delighting in their own cleverness. When they took control of @FIFAWorldCup, they tweeted a few times about a conspiracy against the Syrian national soccer team and then a whole bunch more times saying things like "Twitter #failure" and "Syrian Electronic Army was here." None of their work suggests that this is a serious political group trying to effect change or even mere chaos; this is probably a handful of dumb teens.

The AP tweet was not hard to pick out as a hoax. The phrasing was wrong; the AP writes "BREAKING" in loud capital letters, whereas the hacked tweet was properly capitalized; it was sent via the web whereas legitimate @AP tweets are usually sent via Social Flow, a marketing service; and the president was referred to simply as Barack Obama, a violation of the AP's style guide. That's on top of the fact that, well, if there was a bombing at the White House, it's pretty doubtful that @AP, fast as they are, would be the first and only source to get the word out; they weren't nearly the first to tweet about the Boston Bombings, for example, and this hacked tweet was not accompanied by any corroborating eyewitness reports.

@ap has been hacked. No explosions at White House.

— Brian Lydon (@brianchicago76) April 23, 2013

Compare the effect of this fake tweet--near-instantaneous dismissal and eye-rolling--with the very worrying case of Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who had been missing for a few weeks. At 2:43AM early in the morning of April 19th, one Greg Hughes, an active Reddit contributor, tweeted Tripathi's name as a possible suspect in the Boston Bombing, citing a mention on the Boston Police Department's scanner feed. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal was unable to find anything resembling Tripathi's name in the scanner's logs, but it didn't matter; within hours, Sunil had become the number one suspect in the bombings for Twitter and Reddit.

He was cleared by late afternoon, when the FBI identified the Tsarnaev brothers as the primary suspects. His whereabouts are still unknown.

Hughes's tweet was earnest; it cited a source assumed to be trustworthy (though it is not, and it doesn't seem to have come from that source anyway), it came from someone trying to help. It was plausible. The easiest way to fool someone is to have already fooled yourself, and in publishing something he thought was true, Hughes's tweet became far more powerful than anything a prankster group of Syrian hackers could come up with.

These two stories show both sides of the crowd-sourced hive mind with which we analyze information on Twitter. On the one hand, the masses came to the right conclusion very quickly in the case of the AP hack; if you looked at literally a single tweet besides the one from @AP, even if you weren't sure what to think, you'd immediately have to consider the possibility that the tweet was not genuine. It caused no damage, no panic. Nobody was hurt, really; it's hard to even blame the Associated Press. It could happen to anyone, and the AP was conscientious in conveying what had happened (and getting their Twitter feed temporarily shut down) within minutes. The power of the crowd directed people to the truth.

And yet the painfully earnest computer-chair detective work from Reddit and Twitter may well have destroyed the life of an innocent college kid from suburban Pennsylvania. We don't know where he is or if he's okay, we don't know if he'll come back or how he'll recover from being falsely accused of mass murder if he does. When we discuss the problem of oversaturation of news--which we should, repeatedly and at length--we need to remember that. The Syrian Electronic Army's intentions may have been to hurt, and Reddit's intentions may have been to help, but it doesn't matter. Misinformation is misinformation, and Reddit proved a far more effective and destructive source than the hackers.

As of 2013, 24 states and Washington, DC, have either legalized marijuana or decriminalized possession of it. One of my friends lives in a state where medical marijuana is now legal, and he has taken full advantage of this to start growing the plant, which helps him manage the symptoms of a chronic illness, in his basement. Rather than use his real name, I'll just refer to him by his online handle, GrowingGreenLED. I've known GGL for years, and I knew that even when it was illegal, he used marijuana for medical reasons. The whole grow-your-own was a new thing for him -- and me. Curious about the enterprise, I asked if he'd be willing to chat with me about the ins and outs of growing one's own plants. In particular, I was curious about his all-LED setup.

LED lights have been taking over all areas of normal life, replacing horrible blue-tinted compact fluorescents, incandescents, and even specialty bulbs (stage lighting, street lights and the like) such as metal halide high-intensity discharge lamps or high-pressure sodium lamps, but they're still something of a controversial topic in the pot-growing world. Until recently, they simply did not put out enough photons to keep plants happy. LED technology has improved markedly over the last five years, and today's 10-watt diodes can give out something like 800-900 lumens, on par with standard metal-halide grow lamps, and slightly lower than high-pressure sodium.

In order to grow healthy marijuana plants, then coax them to flower and produce a lot of cannabinoids, the grower must provide the plants with lots of light of the proper wavelengths, control the length of "day" that the plant experiences during its life cycle, and control the temperature so as to not stress the plants.

The grow-lamp setup of choice in the recent past was a combination of metal-halide discharge lamps and high-pressure sodium lamps. The two kinds of lamps present complementary spectral characteristics that marijuana plants needs for the vegetative and flowering stages, and the two kinds of lamps generate a lot of lumens -- that is, a lot of photons that the plants can use for photosynthesis. What those lights also produced was a lot of heat--and big electricity bills. And the bulbs themselves, while lasting longer than an incandescent bulb, still burned out fairly quickly. LEDs have much longer lifetimes than either of those lamps, on the order of 30,000 hours of use; metal-halide lamps live between 6,000 and 15,000 hours.

Another benefit of LED arrays is their capacity for spectral tuning. A single lamp could have both a collection of blue-light and red-light LEDs; selectively turning off some LEDs of a particular color will tune the overall color of the light.

To understand why, it's important to grok that plants, including marijuana, have two phases of growth. The vegetative (veg) phase is when the plants do their growing. The flowering phase is when the plants switch over resources to produce flowers or buds, which in the case of marijuana contain a very high concentration of desirable cannabinoids.

According to GGL, in veg mode, the plants like a bit of blue light mixed in with the typical yellow-red to encourage plant growth. GGL uses Solar Flare brand LED lights made by California Light Works, which add light between 475nm and 500nm to the spectrum. In flowering, light between 600nm and 700nm is best. So being able to tune the light source (by picking only certain colors of LED to use in a lighting setup) so that they're only producing the wavelengths that each phase requires will result in better flowers for less wasted energy and waste heat.

Waste heat is a problem, especially for growers who keep their plants in grow-tents--fabric enclosures that help the grower maintain the optimum environment for plant growth and flowering--that may not be well-ventilated. Stressed plants don't produce as many flowers (which means yields will be bad), and so maintaining temperatures below 80°F is desirable. (GGL also keeps humidity at around 55 percent, by switching a ventilation fan on and off, to suppress the growth of mildew on the plants.)

GGL says that he decided to splash out for LEDs for a couple of reasons: He doesn't want the family electricity bill to skyrocket. And, he admits, he's an early-adopter tech nerd. At present, he says he has about 1050 watts worth of lighting equipment, spread out between the two tents that he grows his crop in, the veg tent and the flowering tent. GGL uses light units made by California Light Works -- the aforementioned Solar Flare lights, plus Solar Storm rigs as well, but that company is far from the only producers of LED grow lights.

So, how are his plants doing? According to a lab analysis of a couple of his plants, the THC levels are some of the highest that the lab had ever seen. For someone who uses the plant to alleviate pain rather than merely as a recreational experience, that's a good sign. And despite tending to his allotment of healthy plants (each state has a different number of plants one can legally grow), his power bill has not increased significantly. I think mostly, though, GGL just loves a good high/low tech project. Gardening is generally pretty low-tech. Growing plants in one's basement in order to maximize output while minimizing input is not, and it satisfies GGL's inner tech geek in ways that just cultivating plants would not. He gets the same way about brewing beer, about hunting for razor clams, and about re-engineering instruments for RockBand. GGL is a man after PopSci's geeky heart and brain if there ever was one.

A newly found faraway galaxy called SDSSJ1506+54 is the most efficient star maker ever seen, using up almost all of the gas available to it. Other galaxies are more profligate with their gas, only using some of it and leaving the rest just lying there.

Stars form when collapsing gas clouds condense so tightly that they ignite nuclear fusion. In the Milky Way, the gas is relatively diffuse, with stars clustered in small pockets throughout the loose tendrils of its spiral arms. But in SDSSJ1506+54, everything is very compact, with most of the galaxy's light streaming from a region just a few hundred light-years across, according to new research. Put another way, the galaxy is emitting starlight from an area just a fraction of the size of our own galaxy, but it's making stars hundreds of times faster. It's so fast, it's at the theoretical speed limit for this process--any faster, and newborn stars would blow away too much gas and deny the births of their brethren.

Astronomers only noticed it because it is so glaringly bright in infrared, which is the light range where NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope has been combing the skies. Its brightness in infrared is equivalent to more than a thousand billion times the energy of our sun, according to NASA. Astronomers decided to take a closer look, which they can do using sensitive radio telescopes that can perceive very long wavelengths of light.

Using the the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, astronomers were able to detect telltale signs of the galaxy's carbon monoxide, which is an excellent tracer for star formation. Then they were able to measure its mass and find out its efficient gas consumption. Their work is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Within a few million years, this will all be over, however--the gas will be used up, and SDSSJ1506+54 will be a big elliptical galaxy. Then the star-formation will have to wait until old stars die and become supernovae, spewing their gas into the cosmos for the process to start again.

[via NASA]

We met up at a dim sum place in Chinatown. He smiled when he saw me, and I gave him a long hug. Already, there was none of the stiff awkwardness that had plagued our first two dates. What my companion didn't know was that minutes before arriving at the restaurant, I had inhaled two puffs of oxytocin, a polypeptide hormone that might be the biological basis for love.

The brain releases oxytocin into the bloodstream during physical contact such as stroking, hugging, and sex. When this happens, blood pressure lowers and you feel calm, safe, and trusting. As a part of the body's anti-stress system, it works as a mirror to adrenalin, the hormone associated with the fight-or-flight response. I was researching oxytocin for an article about the science of love, and I decided to conduct a little experiment: Could taking the hormone before a date make me fall in love?

I ordered the $60 bottle of OxytocinFactor from ABC Nutriceuticals, one of a handful of companies that sells the hormone as a nasal spray. Three days later, a box containing 30 milliliters of oxytocin arrived at my doorstep from Boise, Idaho. The packaging read, "The hormone that makes love and relationship possible." Bryan Post, the owner of the company, told me that he tested his product on "himself, his mother and 30 other people." He claims the drug isn't addictive, and it won't get you high-it just "lowers your anxiety."

For decades after its discovery in 1906, oxytocin was regarded as a "female hormone" because mothers' brains release it during childbirth, according to Kerstin Moberg, a Swedish scientist and an early pioneer in oxytocin science. But in the late 1980s, Moberg's research showed that both men and women get an oxytocin rush when they are in physical contact. Animal studies in the 1990s found that the brains of many other mammals release oxytocin during mating.

Of course, I knew the placebo effect could mangle that the results of my not-so-scientific experiment, so earlier that day I met with Marcel Kinsbourne, a neuropsychologist at The New School in New York City. In his office at Union Square, I told him about my plan to take oxytocin before a date that same night. He got very excited, but told me that a lot of factors can play a role in what happens. The third date is often when a pair has the best time together, and it's important not to draw any conclusion from that, he said in his calming German accent. He made me promise to report back the results.
Oxytocin products are being marketed on the internet as pills and sprays to increase trust and cure stress.

I also spoke with two women who definitely don't believe the oxytocin rush is all placebo effect. Susan Kuchinskas and Elisabeth Cruz organize oxytocin parties in Berkeley, California. Called "Love Chemistry," the parties are for people who are interested in the science of love, says Kuchinskas. At the parties, people take artificially produced oxytocin together as an icebreaker. Cruz and Kuchinskas have gotten many different reactions from the attendees. "Some people feel warm and then they feel really calm while others feel disconnected, and they don't know if they like it or not," says Cruz. "There have also been nights when people feel so comfortable they don't want to go home."

But many scientists remain dismissive of how oxytocin products are being marketed on the internet as pills and sprays to increase trust and cure stress. "Some of the indications and proposed usages of oxytocin might very well be true, but there is too little research to say so yet," says Moberg. Many of the properties attributed to the hormone rely on just one study, she explains.

There are many studies, however, that have examined the effects of oxytocin on animals. In one 2003 experiment, researchers petted pairs of rats that were caged together. When they were later released into a larger group, the two rats were much more likely to mate than rats that hadn't been stroked. The researchers saw the same results among pairs of rats that received injections of oxytocin instead of petting.

I was skeptical that my spray would have any effect at all. Morberg told me that when oxytocin is released into the bloodstream it comes in waves, sometimes over a long period of time. So taking a dose through the nose might produce an effect, but it will never be as strong as when the body releases the hormone naturally.

Just before I left for dinner, I took the little blue bottle out of my refrigerator and sprayed a blast of liquid into each nostril. At first I didn't feel anything; whatever was in OxytocinFactor was completely tasteless and odorless. But after a minute, I got a thickening feeling around my nose, as though I had suddenly developed a cold. I could also feel some of the chilled liquid running down the back of my throat. The stuffy-nose feeling subsided after a few minutes, so I ran out the door and hopped on the subway.
I took the little blue bottle out of my refrigerator and sprayed a blast of liquid into each nostril.
On the train I felt a little dizzy; I imagined the liquid ascending into my brain and expanding like a cloud. But I started to feel my otherwise tense shoulders relaxing. By the time I arrived at the restaurant, 20 minutes had passed since I'd inhaled the oxytocin.

I decided not to tell my date I had taken the hormone. Kinsbourne had explained that if just one person acts more comfortable and interested, it can spark a natural release of oxytocin in the other person. My companion was tall with dark hair, and I thought I had never seen him so nicely dressed before. He wore dark jeans, a black jacket and a hat (in retrospect, I hate chunky hip-hop caps, but at the time I found everything about him very charming.) We took a tiny table in the middle of the room. It was a brightly lit, busy place, and the waitresses were screaming loud orders in Shanghainese. It wasn't romantic, but I didn't care-I was in a very good mood.

And my date definitely seemed more confident and relaxed. I sensed that he liked this calmer version of me better than the very intense and chatty version he had met before. We took a long walk home, and, for the first and only time, I imagined us as a couple.

We were going uptown on the same train, and before he headed out, he asked me if he could come with me back to my place. Sitting there close to him, I wanted to say yes, and it felt strange to leave him after such an intimate evening. But something made me hesitate, the train stopped, and I said no. He bent forward and kissed me on the cheek, looking miserable as he left the train. Oxytocin might have increased my trust and made me more patient, but it hadn't made me lose my guard.

After our very affectionate date, I was excited to meet him again a few days later. I didn't take oxytocin this time. He came to my place for pancakes, and I was a little nervous. As he sat there in my kitchen, we suddenly had nothing to talk about. It was back to stiff conversation. I didn't find him very attractive and got annoyed that I had to come up with things to talk about.

I think he could feel it, and after we said goodbye, he sent me a text thanking me for the pancakes. I never heard from him again. Maybe I was under the spell of oxytocin that earlier night, or perhaps it was, as Kinsbourne said, "the magic of the third date."

Viola Gad is a freelance writer based in New York City. Follow her on Twitter as @violagad.

Talk about a mind meld. Researchers have hooked up living brain cells, grown in a petri dish, to a computer.

The computer runs a simulation of a power plant and sends the neurons problems about electricity distribution. Scientists then take the solutions the brain cells come up with as possible equations for controlling the U.S. electrical grid in the future. (Actual solutions for controlling electricity around the U.S. wouldn't use living neurons; they would just use computer code written after scientists studied what the neurons came up with.)

"In a lab, in simulation studies, we have shown that we can intelligently control a power plant with such biologically inspired neural networks," Kumar Venayagamoorthy, one of the project scientists, tells Popular Science. Venayagamoorthy is an engineer at Clemson University in South Carolina. A lab-grown network of neurons, he says, "learns the dynamics of the power plant and based on the learned dynamics, it's able to predict future states."

Venayagamoorthy and his colleagues, including engineers at Clemson and neuroscientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, are trying to create new equations that will make the U.S. more energy efficient. Right now, power plants around the U.S. are linked to each other and to buildings and houses. That whole network is called the power grid.

That infrastructure is getting old, however, and many researchers are hoping to replace it with more sophisticated connections that can do things like go around a transmission line downed by a storm, or give homeowners more detailed stats about their hour-to-hour electricity use. Such sophisticated features will need complex computer code to control them.

Venayagamoorthy says he's specifically looking for equations to control power generation and transmission. He and his colleagues started their research into neuron-controlled power plants in 2008.

He thinks he'll have a system ready to demonstrate to utility companies in two or three years. After that, if the companies like what they see, the scientists will have to do more research to make it commercially viable before it goes into the actual grid that hooks up to Americans' homes-a process that may take more than a decade.

LEDs should be lighting the way to a greener future: They use 75 percent less energy and last 25 times longer than incandescent light bulbs, and they do so at a cooler temperature. But right now, we mostly use LEDs in electronics, because they have a bit of a drooping problem: at higher currents, the amount of light they produce takes a nose-dive.

The efficiency droop has baffled scientists for years, but researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and France's École Polytechnique say they've finally solved the mystery.

Their work, published in a forthcoming issue of the Physical Review Letters, identifies the source of the droop as a process called Auger recombination, a non-radiative process that produces heat. Previous research at UCSB theorized that Auger recombination might be the culprit, but this is the first study to measure the effect conclusively.

LED-based lights contain a microchip with a positive-type and a negative-type semiconductor made of gallium nitride. Between the two, in a quantum well, the negative electrons from one semiconductor and the electron holes from the other combine, producing a photon of light. When you apply more electricity, it produces more photons--to a point.

In low power situations, like in your cell phone, the process works great. But when you raise the current up to the level it takes to light a room, nitride-based LEDs stop producing photons at the same rate. According to the research from UCSB's Center for Energy Efficient Materials, it's because the electrons collide with each other and lose their energy through heat instead of light.

If we could make LEDs that circumvent that issue, they could replace compact fluorescent lights as the energy-efficient bulb of the future. Theoretically, LEDs should produce about 300 lumens per watt, making them three times more efficient than CFLs, as well as easier to dispose of since they don't contain mercury. Widely adopting LED lighting could save the country $265 billion and reduce our electricity demand by one third in the next 20 years, according to a 2010 estimate from the U.S. Department of Energy.

But it does cost more upfront, so until LED technology can live up to their theoretical efficiency at higher currents, it's a tough sell. While the U.S. is already phasing out energy-sucking incandescent light bulbs, LEDs have yet to take over the commercial and residential lighting market.

So far, we don't have a solution to the droop, but now that they've identified the source of the problem, the researchers hope to design LEDs that will minimize the effect and produce more light, making the technology a more attractive choice for home and office lighting.

The inventor of the modern hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell, once imagined that his vehicle would cross the Atlantic at 100 miles per hour, an ocean liner coasting on air. While small hovercraft still serve a role in recreation and military landings, Cockerell's dream of hover liners is now defunct. The last significant commercial hovercraft service-which traversed the English Channel and carried 1.25 million passengers annually at its peak-was discontinued in 2000.

What sank it? First, the fuel costs were prohibitive. The vehicle's four Rolls-Royce engines consumed 1,200 gallons of fuel per hour. That was fine during the 1950s and 1960s, when fuel was very cheap, but the costs became more burdensome. The Neoprene skirt that encircled the craft created another problem. Engineers designed the skirt to bend and flex over choppy water while maintaining a bubble of air beneath the skirt. But at 75 mph, the rubber took a beating on most trips. According to Roger Syms and Robin Paine, two former hovercraft pilots who wrote a history of the vehicle, On a Cushion of Air, portions of the skirt needed daily repair or replacement. "When you have a car, you don't expect that you'll have to change the tires every night," Syms says. To make a large-scale hovercraft commercially viable today, Paine says, "There would have to be a huge advance in skirt technology."

Have a burning science question? Email it to fyi@popsci.com or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

It's not exactly a solar panel. It's more like a solar dish. And not only does it generate electricity, it makes water, too.

Researchers at companies and universities in Switzerland are developing a parabolic solar energy-capturing dish that they hope will be cheaper than current panels and be able to use some of the heat it captures, too: The heat goes into a desalination system that turns salt water into potable water.

Officially, the whole dish-desalinator complex is called the High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal system. The Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation gave the developing team $2.4 million to make it. Researchers at IBM Zurich are currently testing a prototype, according to IBM. Researchers also plan to build prototypes in two other cities in Switzerland.

The inside surface of each solar dish is covered with small mirrors that reflect light onto receivers containing hundreds of small solar energy-converting chips. Each receiver gets solar energy that's much more concentrated than direct sunlight. On a day that's sunny for eight hours, each receiver makes 25 kilowatts of power.

The dish's makers hope the system will make electricity at a low enough cost to compete with coal power because most of it-the whole reflecting parabola-doesn't require expensive materials.

Meanwhile, each dish's receivers get not only concentrated sunlight, but enough heat to melt them in seconds. To keep things cool, dishes have a liquid coolant system that IBM originally designed for high-performance computers. The liquid coolant absorbs heat from the receivers, and then goes to evaporate salt water in the desalination portion of the system.

One square meter's (about 11 square feet) worth of receivers could make 30 to 40 liters (about 8 to 10 gallons) of fresh water a day, according to IBM.

[IBM]

We did it, everyone! A space program decades in the making has culminated with this: a penis on the surface of Mars.

An intrepid Reddit user spotted the suggestive tracks made by the Opportunity rover, and the photo's actually on NASA's official site. The drawing was probably not intentional. But still. Look at that photo. That's a penis, right? Definitely a penis.

[NASA via Reddit]

The same chemical that makes fertilizer so useful also makes it really cheap bomb fuel. Researchers at Sandia labs in Albuquerque wondered if they could render the explosive properties of fertilizer inert while still keeping the beneficial properties intact, and this week announced success in a test batch. Even better, they're sharing the innovation for free.

The problem with improvised explosives is that they're cheap, made from otherwise-harmless everyday materials, and the directions to make them aren't too hard to find. This is true of pressure cooker bombs, a terror weapon so ubiquitous that its been used by everyone from anarchists to religious radicals on at least three continents, and it's especially true of fertilizer bombs.

Ammonium nitrate is the culprit. The first recipe for ammonium nitrate is over 350 years old, and despite centuries of research into other fertilizers, ammonium nitrate remains one of the cheapest and best. As an added benefit for farmers, ammonium nitrate "improves both the quantity and quality of protein-containing crops," which is a tremendous benefit to humanity.

Except for that part where it explodes. Normally, of course, ammonium nitrate doesn't blow up; if that was a daily occurrence, the recipe would have been abandoned 349 years ago. Ammonium nitrate requires the addition of another reagent to go off. In modern fertilizer bombs, readily available fuel completes the process, turning the normally-stable fertilizer into an extremely volatile explosive.

How did the Sandia Labs researchers get around this problem? Chemistry. It turns out that mixing iron sulfate with ammonium nitrate ends up like a strange double date, with both pairs changing partners. Sandia Labs quotes chief researcher Kevin Fleming:

The resulting mixture is inert, even combined with fuel. Because it still has all the same compounds that make it valuable as a fertilizer, and there are some soils where the iron itself is beneficial. Even better, iron sulfate is so cheap it's commonly thrown away by foundries, which means adding it to ammonium nitrate fertilizer will hardly increase the fertilizer's cost.

More importantly, Sandia Labs isn't going to patent their new fertilizer innovation. This makes sense, as making a non-exploding fertilizer is hardly a gamble for market share, but it's a nice touch. With any luck, it means farmers worldwide will soon be able to fertilizer crops without worrying about explosions, too.

Billions of billions of billions of maybe-helpful molecular compounds remain to be discovered, and used for targeting a whole host of medical problems. But who has the time to conjure a novemdecillion drugs? (That number is a 1 with 60 zeroes after it.) Nobody has the tools or the treasure to do that. To help narrow things down, scientists at Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh created an imaginary library of every compound that could exist. The sections are all marked out--now chemists can get to work filling them in.

The small molecule universe, or SMU as they call it, is the set of all feasible organic molecules below a certain weight. Small molecules can cross cell walls or bind to cells, while larger molecules above 500 Daltons are too big to be as effective. Chemists led by Duke's David Beratan built a representative library--in some ways more like an encyclopedia--which contains representations of all those feasible molecular compounds.

They made it using a new piece of software they called Algorithm for Chemical Space Exploration with Stochastic Search (ACSESS), which uses random statistics to search the unknown. It makes random changes to known molecules, maybe adding a nitrogen here or a carbon there. Synthetic chemists checked that the new combinations made sense, and the team used that information to further train their algorithm. Ultimately, by cataloging like with like, the team came up with 9 million examples that represent all the regions of the small-molecule universe. You can think of it like an encyclopedia of molecules grouped by type: One example could have billions of subsets.

In this stochastic voyage, the researchers found some interesting things. First, there are apparently large gaps in the existing compound collections, which is both a result of nature's proclivity for patterns and a result of human builders. Nature uses any available building blocks to create new compounds, while humans in the lab only have a few ingredients to work with. Second, the team found vast regions of emptiness, small molecule dark matter, where countless new compounds may fit in like unknown puzzle pieces.

This is helpful because chemists can use it like a treasure map--they may not know what they'll find, but the map provides some pathways to get there. "It facilitates the mining of chemical libraries that do not yet exist, providing a near-infinite source of diverse novel compounds," the authors explain. The source code for this algorithm is available to other researchers, and the paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

After a showing of the movie Revenge of the Electric Car, I was participating in a question and answer session when someone in the audience shouted, "Your car is not zero-emission!"

Although the Leaf has no tailpipe and causes no local emissions, I had to acknowledge that my car's use of electricity indirectly contributes to smokestack emissions from power plants that burn fossil fuels.

In other words, it's a transfer of pollution to a different point in the 'carbon cycle'.

This of course begs the question: What's the point of driving an electric car from an environmental perspective if this is happening, the other benefits notwithstanding?

Chin up, my friends: All is not lost.

At this point, I'll direct you to a U.S. Department of Energy link that lets you determine your plug-in electric car's CO2 footprint.

As you know, power companies across the country produce electricity both by burning hydrocarbons and from renewable sources that vary from region to region--making electric vehicles 'greener' in certain areas of the country than in others.

Keep in mind an electric car gets cleaner as the sustainability movement grinds its way forward and individual power grids gain a higher percentage of renewables.

Not having the patience to wait for that to happen, I chose a different path: solar power.

During the past year, my Leaf used roughly 1800 kilowatt-hours of electricity, so I had a photovoltaic system installed that will offset the power required to fuel my car.

Since the utility rate where I live is $0.14/kWh, slightly above the national average, that works out to be $252 a year if I were to buy that amount of power.

So what's the payback, you're thinking?

For me, it's a combination of not buying gasoline--the savings of which will pay for the solar panels over a period of several years--along with the comfort of knowing my ride is truly zero-emission.

So, the question remains: Will your next vehicle be zero-emission …Yes or No?

This article, written by Marc Lausier, was originally published on Green Car Reports, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook and Twitter.

The avian H7N9 virus keeps spreading in China and even beyond the mainland, with one case confirmed in Taiwan April 24.

We updated you on April 12 about the state of the outbreak. Since then, more people have gotten sick and died, and scientists are still scrambling to better understand how the virus works. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization's assistant director-general for health, security and the environment, said April 24 in Beijing, "This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans."

Here's the latest:

What is H7N9? The virus is a bird flu (a virus that originated from one adapted to attack birds) of a particular type. This outbreak is the first time an H7N9 virus has been found to infect people.

How many people have gotten sick? As of 4 p.m. April 23 in China, the flu has infected 108 people in China, mostly in the provinces around Shanghai, as well as one person in Taiwan who traveled regularly in eastern China. Most infected people have severe symptoms. Twenty-two people have died.

Is this a pandemic? There's still no evidence that H7N9 spreads easily between people, a trait that's necessary for a pandemic. Nevertheless, both Fukuda and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said it wouldn't be surprising if person-to-person transmission happened occasionally during this outbreak.

How do people get H7N9? At least in some cases, exactly how people are getting sick seems to be a mystery. Taiwanese officials said the infected Taiwanese man hadn't been near birds when he visited China, nor had he eaten undercooked poultry or eggs.

While some families have had more than one member get sick at the same time, scientists aren't sure if that means they're getting the illness from each other, or if they're simply all exposed to the same birds or other infectious factors, Fukuda said.

H7N9 does seem to move more easily from birds to people than H5N1, the bird flu that began infecting people in Asia in 2003, Fukuda said.

What does it mean when the World Health Organization says this is one of the most lethal flus scientists have ever seen? Many news outlets have reported on Fukuda's comment that "this is definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses that we have seen so far." Fukuda is referring to how many people H7N9 kills, out of all the people it infects. So far, it's killed 22 people out of 108 confirmed cases.

In the U.S., seasonal flu annually kills anywhere from 3,000 to 49,000 people (it's different every year) of the five to 20 percent of the country's entire population that gets infected.

H5N1 killed up to 60 people out of every 100 infected, CNN reported.

What is China doing about this? The Chinese government has slowed H7N9's spread by shutting down live poultry markets in hotspot areas, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Compared to its reaction to previous disease outbreaks, such as SARS, the Chinese government is being very open about what's happening, allowing outsiders to track how much of a threat H7N9 will be, the Washington Post reported. Chinese scientists have published a paper about what happened to the first three people to die from H7N9. They've also shared virus samples and genetic information with scientists around the world.