Along with annoyingly adhering to your TV screen and tabletops, dust can be a deadly material, exploding with enormously destructive force in places like coal mines, sugar refineries and grain silos. The explosive properties of normal dust are pretty well known, but what about non-traditional dust? Not all dusts are created equal - and dust derived from the materials of the future could present a very different type of danger.

Led by S. Morgan Worsfold of Dalhousie University in Halifax, a team of researchers from Canada and Norway set out to determine these properties. They surveyed the fairly small body of published research on blowing up nanoparticles, flocculent materials - fluffy synthetic stuff - and hybrid dust mixtures, which they define as any dust with an added liquid or gas.

Dust is defined as a teeny solid less than 420 microns in diameter, but that does not cover the nanoscale world. Nanodust, and its potential explosive properties, is relatively under-studied. A general rule of thumb in the world of dust research holds that the smaller the particle size and the greater its surface area, the more explosive it is. Nanoparticles are tiny, but have a large relative surface area because of the way atoms are arranged in them. They also tend to want to clump together, and this is one of the properties that makes items like carbon nanotubes and graphene so interesting to study. But these large agglomerations of nanoparticles, called nanpowders, are also pretty explosive, igniting with just 1 millijoule of energy. They could ignite with a spark, a collision or mere friction, according to Worsfold and colleagues. And because they're so small, nanoparticles can remain suspended in the air for days or weeks and you would never know it.

Then there's flocculent dust, which is made of fibers and has a non-spherical shape, and is derived from all the synthetic materials in our homes, like polyesters, acrylics and nylons. These materials don't fall under the normal definition of dust, but they are dangerous all the same, the researchers say - flocculent materials are often manufactured using electrostatics, so they could ignite if something goes wrong. Hybrid mixtures could be any type of dust particle with a liquid or gas, so those are more variable.

The researchers say much more study is needed to understand the explosivity of these different dusts, especially nanodust, as nanotechnology grows ever more prevalent. Their paper appears in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

Our good friends over at Sound + Vision just posted a great little explainer on crossovers, "the part of a loudspeaker that people least understand." (They're kind of like filters that send different parts of the input audio to different parts of the speaker.) It's a great way to actually figure out what's going on inside your boom-cubes (the preferred audiophile term for speakers, we assume). Read more over at S+V.

In the future, implantable computerized dispensaries will replace trips to the pharmacy or doctor's office, automatically leaching drugs into the blood from medical devices embedded in our bodies. These small wireless chips promise to reduce pain and inconvenience, and they'll ensure that patients get exactly the amount of drugs they need, all at the push of a button.

In a new study involving women with osteoporosis, a wirelessly controlled implantable microchip successfully delivered a daily drug regimen, working just as well, if not better, than a daily injection. It could be an elegant solution for countless people on long-term prescription medicines, researchers say. Patients won't have to remember to take their medicine, and doctors will be able to adjust doses with a simple phone call or computer command.

Pharmacies-on-a-chip could someday dispense a whole suite of drugs, at pre-programmed doses and at specific times, said Robert Langer, the Institute Professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who is a co-author on the study.

"It really depends on how potent the drugs are," he said. "There are a number of drugs for things like multiple sclerosis, cancer, and some vaccines that would be potent enough."

Langer and fellow MIT professor Michael Cima developed an early version of an implantable drug-delivery chip in the late 1990s. They co-founded a company called MicroCHIPS Inc., which administered the study being published today in Science Translational Medicine. The team decided to work with osteoporosis patients because the disease, and the drug used to treat it, presented a series of special opportunities, Langer said. A widely used drug called teriparatide can reverse bone loss in people with severe osteoporosis, but it requires a daily injection to work properly. This means up to 75 percent of patients give up on the therapy, Langer said. It's also a very potent drug that requires microgram doses, making it an ideal candidate for a long-term dispensary implant.

Getting the chips to work well required some tinkering on the part of the company, including the addition of a hermetic seal and drug-release system that can work in living tissue. The chip contains a cluster of tiny wells, about the size of a pinprick, which store the drug. Each well is sealed with an ultrathin layer of platinum and titanium, Langer said. At programmed times or at the patient's command, an external radio-frequency device sends a signal to the chip, which applies a voltage to the metal film, melting it and releasing the drug. The wells melt one at a time.

"It's like blowing a fuse, the way we've got it set," Langer said. He said the amount of metal is near nanoscale levels and is not toxic.

The team also had to ensure the chips were secure and could not be hacked. The chips communicate via a special frequency called the Medical Implant Communications Service band, approved by both the FCC and the FDA. A bidirectional communications link between the chip and a receiver enables the upload of implant status information, including confirmation of dose delivery and battery life. A patient or doctor would then enter a special code to administer or change the dose, Langer said.

The research team recruited seven women in Denmark who had severe osteoporosis and surgically implanted the chips into their abdomens in January 2011. The chips stored 20 doses of the drug. The patients had the implants for a year, and they proved extremely popular, Langer said. "They didn't think about the fact that they had it, since they didn't have to have injections," he said.

Ultimately, the device delivered dosages comparable to daily injections, and there were no negative side effects. There was no skipping the shot if a patient didn't feel like visiting the doctor - complying with a prescription is of key importance, said Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering at MIT. "This avoids the compliance issue completely, and points to a future where you have fully automated drug regimens," he said.

The study points out one interesting phenomenon that will inform future research and development on these types of implants. When you implant a device into a person's body, the body forms a fibrous, collagen-based membrane that surrounds the foreign device. This can affect how well drugs can move from the device and into the body, which in turn affects dosage requirements and pharmaceutical potency. One of the aims of this study was to examine the effects of that collagen membrane, and the researchers found it did not have any deleterious effects on the drug.

Now that these chips have been proven to work, Langer and the others want to test them with other drugs and for longer dosage periods, he said. Because the well caps melt one at a time, the chips could be used to deliver different types of drugs, even those that would normally interact with each other if taken in shot or pill form, he said. The team wants to build a version with 365 doses to see how well it works.

It could even be used as a long-term sensing device, he said, an interesting possibility of its own. Medical sensing implants can degrade once they're in the body, so implants that could check for things like blood sugar or cancer antibodies can lose their effectiveness. But a chip with multiple sensors can work a lot longer - once a sensor is befouled, simply melt another well and expose a fresh one, Langer said.

The ultimate goal is to create a chip that could combine sensing and drug delivery - an implantable diagnostic machine that can deliver its own therapy.

"Someday it would be great to combine everything, but that will obviously take longer," Langer said.

Instability begets instability. At least, that's the lesson learned from a couple of Caltech researchers studying the way magnetic field lines break and reconnect. Such magnetic breakage and reconnection at some scales can be quite violent, like when the sun's magnetic field lines snap and toss off a coronal mass ejection. But at smaller scales, it just looks really cool.

There's a ton of cool science behind this video that won't be expounded upon in detail here, but suffice it to say that the researchers decided the best way to observe the corkscrewing effect that occurs when plasmas shed their electrons, creating a magnetic field that then acts on the plasma (this phenomenon is known as kink instability) was to fire some jets of super-hot, 20,000-degrees-Kelvin plasmas across a 20 centimeter gap in a vacuum and film it with a microsecond camera. In doing so, they discovered that kink instability actually spawns another phenomenon called Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

That's two instabilities for the price of one jet of superhot argon plasma, which is what you're looking at in the video below. Click through to Caltech to see just how kinky this plasma phenomena can be.

[Caltech]

At Dalian Hoffen Bio-Technique Company in northern China, people turn other people into plastic. Plastination is a four-step process during which polymers replace water and fat molecules in biological specimens.

Plastinated bodies don't decompose, and museums and medical schools can display them with exposed muscles, veins and brains in exhibits around the world. One such exhibit, called "Bodies," has visited dozens of cities worldwide since it opened in 2005. Hong-Jin Sui founded the Dalian facility in 2002 after he studied plastination under the man who invented it, Gunther von Hagens. Sui says the human bodies processed at Dalian Hoffen come from medical universities and the animals from zoos and aquariums. It can take more than two years to plastinate large animals, such as whales, but humans take only eight to 12 months.

Okay, so: The obvious question here, in 2012, is "Is there any reason to buy a dedicated portable gaming system when I already have a smartphone?" And I will say yes. I'm not a hardcore gamer, and I found the Vita to be not just the most powerful handheld console ever made, but also an awful lot of fun.

WHAT'S NEW

The Vita, like the PlayStation Portable (PSP) it replaces, introduces a new type of physical media (a little memory card, in this case, in size somewhere between a microSD card and a regular-sized SD card). The system is ridiculously powerful, boasting a quad-core processor and a quad-core graphics processing unit (GPU), plus 512 MB of RAM. (That's significantly more powerful than a current-gen iPad or iPhone, let alone a comparatively underpowered Nintendo 3DS.) It has a giant 5-inch OLED touchscreen, and a curious touch-sensitive back panel. It has two analog joysticks to the PSP's one. It has motion sensing. It is available with 3G. And Sony finally, thankfully makes it easy to download games over the air in addition to purchasing the little physical cards (which are all too easy to lose).

Click to launch a tour of the Vita's hardware.

WHAT'S GOOD

The hardware is mostly very, very good. It has that oval-shaped black-and-silver Sony aesthetic, which is sort of shruggingly classy (though the front panel is very glossy and will quickly become very full of fingerprints). The screen is ridiculous. It's hard to tell until you pick a Vita up how much of a difference that extra screen space makes, compared to, especially, smartphones. It's a bigger screen than any smartphone (even the very large Samsung Galaxy Nexus), and, of course, your fingers aren't blocking it because it has actual buttons to use rather than just a touchscreen. It's super bright, painfully clear, delightfully colorful. Perky, pastel games like Touch My Katamari and Rayman Origins look absurdly cheerful.

The buttons, too, are perfect. Just the right amount of clickiness in the controls, the right amount of movement in the analog joysticks, everything as responsive as can be. Never once did I think to blame my frequent deaths in games on the controls. The touchscreen is also intuitive and responsive, years ahead of the resistive touchscreen of the Nintendo DS models. That's all helped along by the copious processing power, so games run perfectly smoothly.

The buttons, screen size, and gaming-focused hardware make it, flat out, a better "serious" gaming device than I think it's possible for a smartphone to be right now. Smartphone games are super impressive, but the best smartphone games are slight in stature, little timewasters like Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, and Words With Friends. The best games on the Vita are full-featured, absorbing titles. I've played FIFA on both iOS and on the Vita, and there's no comparison. On an iPhone, you're struggling with virtual joysticks (never a good option) on a 3.5-inch screen, made smaller by the fact that your thumbs are blocking a quarter of it. The graphics aren't as good. The options aren't as deep. You realize after playing with the Vita that smartphone games are snacks.

The Vita has a very robust OS behind its games. There has to be a way to open and close apps, adjust settings, work with maps and browsers and communication tools and cameras and all sorts of other things. Basically, there's also a smartphone in there, and I was surprised to find that it's all very thoughtfully and intuitively laid-out. Swipe up and down between your app/game shortcuts (basically, your home page). Swipe horizontally to switch between open apps/games. Close open apps/games with a little "swipe down from the corner to close" mechanism, like turning a page to be done with whatever you were doing. It's all very nice. Other reviewers have found this OS confusing. I find them confusing.

The games are crazy. Considering this is a brand-new system, which needs completely new, exclusive games (though you can download older PSP titles), I'm totally impressed with what Sony put together. The highest-profile games include FIFA, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Mostly, they look amazing--at first glance, almost as good as an Xbox 360 or PS3 title. After you use the system for awhile, you realize it's not quite at that level, but still, a lot of these games are seriously "wow" powerful. They're not dumbed-down for mobile play at all, which feels almost surprising at first, if you're used to the smartphone versions of games.

WHAT'S BAD

Pretty much everything that's not literally playing games is disappointing. Yeah, it has a browser and Google Maps, but guaranteed, if you have a smartphone made in the last three years, your phone is better at both those tasks. (There's no email app, either, and the browser doesn't support any kind of video, not even YouTube.) The on-screen touch keyboard is especially annoying to use, since you have to reach your thumbs over the PlayStation buttons to hit the screen. The back touch panel is gimmicky; only a few games support it, and I found it very uncomfortable to use without accidentally hitting it, and not especially fun besides. (The exception is in FIFA, where the location you tap on the back panel corresponds to which part of the goal you're aiming at. Still uncomfortable to hold, but very effective.) There are some oddities in the OS, like the weirdness of having to tap twice to go into any game or app (once to open the thumbnail, another to actually launch it. Why? No idea.) And the speakers are surprisingly timid, volume-wise.

Sony's taste for proprietary media is a long-standing irritant; the Vita, for example, only supports PS Vita memory cards for things like music and movies, and they are absurdly expensive ($100 for 32GB. SD cards at that capacity cost about thirty bucks). It also is not a particularly open-minded media player, only playing a few types of video and audio files, and the media management software for your computer is very barebones.

The Vita won't fit in your pocket. Not my pocket, not your pocket, not anyone's pocket. I don't mind that, really, because the size is warranted by the screen and the buttons, and I always carry a messenger bag with me anyway. But it's something to note, because while it is fairly light and well-balanced, it is not particularly small. Battery life is rated at around four or five hours; not great, since my general rule is that a gadget should get me through a flight from New York to San Francisco. The Vita won't, though it's not incredibly far off.

THE PRICE

The 3G/Wi-Fi version costs $300, while the Wi-Fi-only version is $250. I'd recommend the Wi-Fi-only version. $300 is a lot for a games system, and if you want to do real multiplayer, it'd be better to have the speed of Wi-Fi anyway.

THE VERDICT

I really like the Vita. The games are great fun, it is astoundingly impressive in a technical sense, it looks excellent, and Rayman Origins is so, so good. Whether it's worth a buy depends on you: do you often find yourself wishing you had better gaming hardware on the go? Are smartphone games feeling too light, too insubstantial? Then yes, get the Vita. I don't really mind that the browser and non-gaming apps sort of suck. They're a bonus, and if your smartphone battery dies or something they might come in handy. The only real drawbacks are the price and the battery life, but I think neither should be a dealbreaker if you're hungering for some real mobile gaming. The Vita is a games system, and it's awesome at playing games.

Neil de Grasse Tyson's ever-entertaining podcast, Star Talk, is recording another live episode tonight, here in New York. He'll be joined by comedian Eugene Mirman and other guests--past guests have included comedians Kristen Schaal and John Hodgman, actor Alan Alda, and astronaut Mike Massimino, so we have our hopes firmly planted very high up for some great guests tonight. We'll be there, tweeting our favorite one-liners and thoughts on the intersection between science nerds and bearded bespectacled Brooklynites, so check out @PopSci starting around 8PM tonight.

When Atari's Pong first came out, Popular Science had a succinct opinion: Playing a game on a video screen was "one of those novelties that everyone will shortly get tired of." We've never been so glad to be wrong.

See the gallery.

As videogame designers rush forward in their perpetual quest to revolutionize the gaming experience, perhaps the most astounding achievement is just how far we've come in one lifetime.

Modern videogames are nearly unrecognizable from their early days of simple flashing lights and monotonous beeping. Here are 10 electronic games from America's not-too-distant past, including Pong, Nintendo's short-lived Virtual Boy and the awkward beginnings of online multiplayer. Whether the goal is paddling a tiny ball across the screen or defending a fictional world from a dragon god, gamers throughout time have one thing in common: They can never get enough playtime.

The jury is still out, in many respects, on exactly what depression is and how it should be treated, but clinically speaking it is usually diagnosed in a psychological rather than a physiological manner--that is, via a questionnaire that is given to patients rather than by some method of empirical testing. But The Atlantic reports that a new study has shown that blood tests can diagnose depression--a finding that could change the way depression is both diagnosed and viewed by patients.

The finding, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, describes an experiment in which 36 adults with serious depression were given blood tests screening for nine biomarkers associated with the symptoms of depression. Forty-three non-depressive patients were also tested as a control. In the end, the blood test accurately indicated depression in 33 of 36 of the subjects with depression. It also registered eight false positives in the control group. The findings were repeated in a second experiment where blood tests went 31 for 34 in diagnosing depression among subjects.

The takeaway? The blood test method isn't perfect, but it's certainly interesting. With some tweaking doctors might be onto a proper clinical test for depression, but in the meantime one of the paper's co-authors said at the very least establishing a physiological link to depression will hopefully get patients to look at their depression as a treatable condition rather than something that's wrong with their minds. More at the Atlantic.

You can get the paper here, but you'll have to bring your subscription to Molecular Psychiatry back into good standing.

[The Atlantic]

Light 18-volt batteries have become the standard for cordless power tools, but they often underperform when faced with difficult tasks such as boring large holes into wood or metal. To produce more strength without resorting to a heavier, higher-voltage battery, engineers at Milwaukee redesigned the motor of the new M18 Fuel drill. The result is a tool that generates about 25 percent more torque than the average 18-volt drill and can create big holes faster than any of them.

Most power tools use motors that employ conductive brushes and pieces of copper to generate an alternating magnetic field that drives the rotor. To increase the M18's torque, engineers replaced brushes with a small electronic circuit board, leaving more room in the motor for rotor-driving magnets. The 4.3-pound tool yields 725 inch-pounds of torque, 30 percent more than its predecessor. All that extra strength doesn't kill the drill's battery life, though. The new motor is also more efficient, allowing the drill to run at least 50 percent longer per charge compared with the previous model

Size: 10.5 x 2.63 x 7.9 inches
Weight: 4.3 pounds
Screws per charge: 506 three-inch deck screws into pine 4x4
Price: $230

Happy Valentine's Week! Have a space rose. Or a cube that tells you the weather outside by touch, that's a good gift, right? Or the tiniest most adorable chameleon ever found, or...you know what, just click through and check out the most amazing images of the week. They are, as the headline suggests, amazing.

Click to see the most amazing science images of the week.

All that happened this week pales in the face of Tiny Chameleon. Tiny Chameleon is the most important news of the week. Of the year. I mean, yeah, we also learned about a teenager who achieved nuclear fusion in his parents' garage, and saw the future of toys, and the most powerful portable games console ever made. But just look at Tiny Chameleon. Look at him!

Want to win this adorable mini-reptilian Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• World's Tiniest Chameleons Found in Madagascar
• The Most Incredible Toys of 2012
• How Much Would You Pay to Plug In Your Gadgets?
• How to Pump Half a Million Gallons of Fuel From a Listing Cruise Liner

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

• The Goods: February 2012's Hottest Gadgets
• Video: PopSci's Ultimate Robot Dance-Off
• Test Drive: The All-Electric BMW Active-E
• How to Pump Half a Million Gallons of Fuel From a Listing Cruise Liner
• The Boy Who Played With Fusion
• NASA's Mars Budget Takes a Beating, Leaving Europe to Fly Joint Missions Solo
• Apple's New Mac OS, "Mountain Lion," Is a Head-On Collision of Mac OS and iOS
• How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole
• A Wirelessly Controlled Pharmacy Dispenses Drugs From Within Your Abdomen
• Sony PlayStation Vita Review: Full-Power Gaming, Portable Package
• Archive Gallery: The Rise of Video Games
• The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, February 13-17, 2012

Yes. Marc Levine, the chief of gastrointestinal radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, has found that a competitive eater's stomach works more like an expanding balloon than a squeezing sac.

For his study, Levine recruited a professional eater, then ranked among the top 10 in the world, and a man who was 45 pounds heavier and four inches taller. He pitted the two against each other in a hot-dog-eating contest and used fluoroscopy, a real-time x-ray, to watch the two men's stomachs. Levine immediately noticed something odd. Even when empty, our stomach-our entire digestive tract, in fact-makes a wavelike muscular contraction called peristalsis that helps move food through the body (scientists also call this anal propagation).

The competitive eater displayed almost no peristalsis. The regular guy stopped eating after just seven dogs-his stomach was full. The pro, however, was still going strong. After 10 minutes and 36 hot dogs, Levine asked him to stop. The pro's stomach had stretched to the point that it took up most of his upper abdomen, and still there wasn't much peristalsis.

By regularly forcing his body to consume past the point of fullness, Levine says, the pro's stomach had adapted to expand. He never felt full, and by never feeling full his stomach showed very little muscle contraction. Experts still don't understand this phenomenon.

Manufacturers of Android smartphones often won't provide an updated, custom version of the operating system for models they no longer sell, so users can't take advantage of new features. For older phones, there's a workaround: CyanogenMod, a free OS built from the source code for the latest versions of Android that Google releases to developers. CyanogenMod is very similar to the official Android platform, but it includes a few extra features, such as Wi-Fi tethering, a screenshot tool, and more security and power-management settings. Many users also say it runs faster than their phone's original Android software.

To upgrade, users usually have to back up the original operating system and then "root" the phone, or disable the security settings that protect its OS from being modified, using a program such as SuperOneClick (free; shortfuse.org). Keep in mind that installing the system incorrectly could render the phone inoperable, and that running an unofficially supported OS could void the phone manufacturer's warranty.

Though rare, official updates for certain older-model Android phones have come out after the release of the CyanogenMod community's version. Check the phone manufacturer's site to see if an update is available before installing CyanogenMod.

Howard Wen is a technology reporter.

Maybe, but it's going to take a long time. For the past 200,000 years or so, fatty and sugary foods were hard for humans to come by and well worth gorging on. Fats help maintain body temperature, sugars provide energy, and craving such food is hardwired: Eating fats and sugars activates reward centers in the brain.

Scientists are finding that the degree to which we experience those cravings can also be influenced by genes. Obesity runs in families, and although scientists still don't know just how much of craving is hereditary and how much is learned, they have located more than 100 genes that seem to be linked to the disease. To evolve out of cravings, we'd need to stop passing down these genes.

Rob DeSalle, an evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, says that could take a while. The health conditions associated with a poor diet mostly affect middle-aged adults, who have probably already had children and passed their genes on. Perhaps, he speculates, if more children and teens get obesity-related ailments, such as heart disease and Type II diabetes, fewer will survive to reproduce, stripping craving-related genes from populations more quickly. Even then, weeding out all 100 genes is unlikely. Also, genes associated with obesity aren't killers. They don't code for sickle-cell anemia or cystic fibrosis. If those bad genes have hung on for a very long time, DeSalle says, marginally bad ones could hang on even longer.

Evolution is a messy process that plays out over millions of years. It typically lags far behind changes in species behavior. Until about 50 years ago, craving fats and sugars actually helped us survive. Then fast food became abundant, and the number of obese people in the U.S. tripled between 1960 and 2007. Half a century is "just not enough time to counteract millennia," says Katie Hinde, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

Even someone genetically predisposed to crave food doesn't have to end up fat. "Your genes are not your destiny," DeSalle says. Take, as an extreme example, people with phenylketonuria, a recessive metabolic disorder in which a person is unable to break down phenylalanine, an amino acid, and risks mental retardation if he ingests it. By avoiding certain foods (eggs, nuts), he'll be fine.

Podcasts are undergoing a minor renaissance lately--every comedian has one, and every news publication has at least one--and, luckily for us, the explosion in quantity has also meant a ton of really amazing, high-quality stuff. In the last few years, writers, scientists, journalists, and all kinds of other interesting folks have taken to the microphone in new record numbers. Podcasts now have sold-out live tapings in front of rapturous audiences. They play at festivals like South by Southwest and Bonnaroo. They're downloaded millions upon millions of times. And there are hundreds of science podcasts out there, each with their own loyal audiences. But some are, of course, better than others. Here are the best of the best.

RADIOLAB

Radiolab is shockingly good. Smart, hip, funny, and arty, it's recorded in seasons, rather than on a typical weekly basis; we're currently in the 10th season of five episodes each, with episodes generally being around 60 minutes. Radiolab episodes are based around a broad theme rather than a topical news peg, with frequent trips "into the field" to find interesting stories. Primary host Jad Abumrad has a background in experimental music composition, which can be heard in the various bleeps and bloops and overlapping audio from different interviews. Radiolab ends up being interesting not just in content, but also in structure.
Sample topics of discussion: Our weird desire to be near to dangerous animals but not in danger, how much information the human mind can reliably handle at once.
Recommended starting point: "Memory and Forgetting"

STAR TALK

Star Talk is Neil deGrasse Tyson's astrophysics podcast. It's around 45-60 minutes long, with new episodes popping up around three times per month. Tyson will often talk about topical issues in astrophysics, and his guests are usually from the entertainment field (actors and comedians mostly), which is a smart choice. We're big fans of Tyson, his vests, and his show; he sometimes hosts Star Talk Live, a taping of the podcast that's open to the public, at Brooklyn's Bell House, which we enthusiastically attend whenever possible.
Sample topics of discussion: The existence of free will, whether Stephen Hawking is only as smart as an alien baby, a Tyson rant on faraway galaxies.
Typical guest: Astronaut Mike Massimino, actor Morgan Freeman.
Recommended starting point: "Live at the Bell House: The Astronaut Session"

PROFESSOR BLASTOFF

Professor Blastoff, hosted by comedians Tig Notaro, Kyle Dunnigan, and David Huntsberger, is part of the Earwolf family of comedy podcasts, one of the major forces in that world (its flagship podcast is Comedy Bang Bang). Probably half of the episodes feature no actual, professional scientist, but the hosts are smart and interested, and the show has this calm rhythm (helped along by Notaro's this-close-to-monotone voice) that makes it ideal for long trips. Episodes are around an hour long, focusing on one very broad theme, like robots, immortality, and taste. It's like listening to your smartest, funniest friends bounce ideas off each other based on what they read over the past week.
Sample topics of discussion: The craveability of kale chips, the importance of compassion in human evolution, and how to harness the ocean's energy.
Typical guest: Comedian Paul F. Tompkins, professor of anthropology Dr. Martin Cohen.
Recommended starting point: "Sexual Attraction"

PROBABLY SCIENCE

Another mostly-comedy podcast like Professor Blastoff, Probably Science finds hosts Matt Kirshen, Brooks Wheelan, and Andy Wood meandering through a discussion of the week's top science stories with a guest list that is, so far, entirely comedian-based. It's a brand-new podcast, only eight episodes in, but last week's episode, which features the very funny Kyle Kinane, showed some real potential. It's early, but this is one to keep an eye on.
Sample topics of discussion: Injecting snakes with estrogen, embarrassing moments from high-school science class, and whether atheists are hypocritical for thinking aliens exist.
Typical guest: Comedian Kyle Kinane.
Recommended starting point: "Episode 7"

SCIENCE FRIDAY/SCIENCE IN ACTION

Science Friday is the science and tech section of NPR's "Talk of the Nation" programming block, and it has the production values and pleasantly pedantic tone of most of NPR's shows. Hosted by Ira Flatow, Science Friday is heavily topical, discussing four or five items of science news from the past week. It's a long show, almost two hours long, and split into two parts for easy consumption. It's not always fabulously entertaining, but its topics are wide-ranging and it's consistently smart and informative. Very similar is the BBC's Science in Action podcast, which also examine's the week's stories with various experts.

There are actually lots of science podcasts like these, and they're mostly boring and lacking personality. It's about the easiest way to do a science podcast--you just pick a few interesting stories from the week and talk about 'em for a few minutes each, then sign off and go have a beer. There's a place for these news-recap podcasts but you certainly don't need to listen to more than one of them. These are two of the best of their type.
Sample topics of discussion: Commercial and military applications for new drones, the effects of bigger solar flares on us, and the psychology of the winter season.
Recommended starting point: This week's episode. Neither of these podcasts have the peaks and valleys of a less structured podcast, so there's not a ton of variation in quality week to week.

TED TALKS

The podcast component of the famous TED Talks ("dedicated to ideas worth spreading") is kind of hard to pin down. It comes out often but not on any reliable schedule, topics range from traditional hard science ideas to architecture, philosophy, history, and art, segments can last between three and 20 minutes long, and individual episodes can range from fascinating and mind-expanding to infuriatingly smug and dull. All that said, TED Talks are often fantastic, and the relatively short length with a single focus and single speaker make it the perfect short-form timewaster.
Examples of guests: Chef Homaro Cantu, actress Jane Fonda, flying man Yves Rossy, writer Malcolm Gladwell.
Recommended starting point: Whatever interests you! Pick and choose a topic that strikes your fancy, and know that whoever's speaking will be an interesting authority on that subject. The segment above, with Homaro Cantu of Chicago's Moto restaurant, is a favorite for us food nerds here at PopSci.

THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE

A live BBC podcast from Brian Cox and Robin Ince, The Infinite Monkey Cage toes the line between science and (extremely British) comedy. It's fast-talking, likably geeky discussion on usually topical subjects between the two old friends and an array of expert guests. The live setting gives it a nice energy, with the hosts feeding off the crowd, and at only 30 minutes, the show never wears out its welcome.
Sample topics of discussion: The intersection and conflict between science and cosmology, the future of manned space flight, the latest neutrino updates, and physics vs. chemistry.
Typical guests: Richard Dawkins, Billy Bragg, and an assortment of physicists, chemists, neuroscientists, and other experts.
Recommended starting point: "Physics v. Chemistry"

60-SECOND SCIENCE

Bite-sized daily podcast episodes from Scientific American. It is, true to its name, only a minute long, and new episodes come out every weekday, focusing on some interesting news story from that day. There's obviously not much time to explore a topic or host interesting guests, but I've found myself listening to this podcast most days. I almost always have a bored minute, and 60-Second Science fills that gap nicely.
Sample topics of discussion: Drunk fruit flies, underground nuclear silos, and parasite-sensing body hairs.
Recommended starting point: Today's news.

LCD e-readers have one big advantage over e-paper ones: color. But what makes LCD screens so vibrant is also their downfall-the backlight necessary to illuminate pixels adds heft, slashes battery life, and can strain readers' eyes. LCDs require a protective layer, typically glass, so they suffer from extreme glare in direct light. E Ink's new Triton e-paper display, which came out in the U.S. this year on the Ectaco jetBook Color, produces 4,096 colors (the same palette as a newspaper) with ambient light alone.

As in E Ink's monochrome screens (reviews: $80 Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Fire), a matrix of millions of tiny capsules filled with charged black and white pigments form the basis of the Triton display. Those pigments move up and down in the capsules when current passes under them, and ambient light illuminates whichever pigments are on top. To create the color, engineers laid a 1.9-million-pixel film on top of that layer. Each pixel is divided into quarters of red, green, blue and white. The state of the capsules below determines which colors will reflect light; for example, if monochrome capsules under the red quadrant are white and the rest black, the pixel appears red. Full-color pages refresh in 800 milliseconds or less, and monochrome ones in 120 to 250 milliseconds. In the future, E Ink will produce a display with even faster refresh times, eventually allowing e-paper to play back video.

Screen Size: 9.7 inches
Readable formats: PDF, JPEG, RTF, GIF, TXT, PNG, EPUB
Battery Life: 10,000 page turns
Weight: 19 ounces
Price: $500

VIBRANT E-PAPER MADE OF GLASS

This year, two companies will launch e-readers with 5.7-inch Qualcomm Mirasol screens (a third launched one last year), which use shifting mechanical elements to reflect ambient light and display colors. Mirasol pixels are made from many microscopic glass elements. Each element consists of a reflective glass pane positioned microns above a movable reflective film. If a charge is applied to the glass, the film moves up to meet it, turning that element black. When the glass and the film are separated, the distance between them determines which light wavelengths will reflect back to the viewer-red, blue or green. The elements' hues blend together to color each pixel.

Hanvon C18 China only; price not set

In late 2010, Verizon rolled out its 4G LTE network, which offers data speeds 10 times as fast as 3G networks. But as mobile data traffic continues to grow-experts anticipate that it will increase 26-fold in the next three years-it's unlikely that any network will be able to keep up. Fortunately, something else is set to happen over the next three years: Wi-Fi could become as ubiquitous and easy to access as cellular is now.

Wi-Fi is up to 15 times as fast as LTE, but at this point it's an unrealistic substitute for cell service. Connecting is not a standard process. Users need to log into access points individually, enter passwords, and go through other credentialing rigmarole. And range is limited; once logged in, a user can't wander more than a few hundred feet from an indoor router. But such limitations will soon be gone.

Later this year, the Wi-Fi Alliance, a consortium that oversees Wi-Fi certification and testing, will release the Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint standard to automate logins. Based on the IEEE 802.11u protocol, Passpoint will allow devices to identify preferred hotspots, connect to them, enter passwords, and authenticate security credentials-all automatically. Users may be able to add Passpoint access to their cellphone plans or sign up for standalone service through another provider, such as Boingo, a company that serves 400,000 hotspots at locations like malls and restaurants. When users with Passpoint walk into a coffee shop or arrive at an airport, their phones will automatically connect with the network.

Wi-Fi's range is also set to increase significantly. In December, the Federal Communications Commission announced a plan to transition unused over-the-air wireless bands into Super Wi-Fi. Unlike today's Wi-Fi, which uses the 2.5-gigahertz and 5-gigahertz bands, Super Wi-Fi's low frequencies (from 470 to 698 megahertz) have longer wavelengths that travel farther and penetrate walls. An indoor hotspot with a 40-milliwatt transmitter will quadruple the range of standard Wi-Fi, and an outdoor four-watt commercial transmitter could create a hotspot that extends two or three miles in a dense city, or up to 40 miles in an open plain.

Super Wi-Fi field tests are already under way in four U.S. towns. In Claudville, Virginia, for example, public-school students and local businesses in the 25-square-mile community have free access to high-speed broadband. The first Super Wi-Fi gear, including dual-mode Wi-Fi/Super Wi-Fi routers, will most likely arrive by 2014. Mobile manufacturers may begin installing Super Wi-Fi chips in devices late next year, and will release dongles that will upgrade older products.

In a Passpoint and Super Wi-Fi world, a user within a short drive of a city or town could have instant, ultrafast Internet access without having to rely on cellular service. Business travelers could use their laptops without cellular USB dongles, tablets wouldn't need power-hungry 3G and 4G radios, and a Skype account could practically replace a phone line. At the very least, Wi-Fi could absorb a lot of the data poised to choke networks, leaving phones to fulfill their primary purpose: making calls.

Dr. David Edwards, of Harvard University's Wyss Institute, is the man behind the controversial (as in, the FDA plans to investigate its safety) breathable caffeine and other vitamins, has been working on a new futuristic food item: edible containers. They've already created tomato containers with gazpacho inside, among other treats.

The project is called WikiCells, and it's a particular kind of biodegradable plastic combined with food particles, sort of like an eggshell. The shell itself can be flavored, and can contain any sort of liquid, foam, or solid product, so you can either peel the shell off or eat it whole. So far they've made orange-flavored packaging with orange juice inside, the aforementioned gazpacho, and wine with a grape-flavored shell.

Edwards says the first appearance of WikiCells will be in fancified restaurants (or Nathan Myhrvold's table), the same kind that might serve liquids encased in a thin skin of themselves by using calcium lactate or various other chemicals. But eventually, Edwards has his eyes set on edible bottles--a possible plastic-free future.

[Harvard via The Daily Mail]