1,250 miles: the diameter of a monstrous hurricane on Saturn, captured in spectacular detail by NASA's Cassini spacecraft

75 percent: the portion of commonly used lipsticks and lip-glosses that tested positive for lead in a recent study

2015: the year this single-seat airplane is set to circumnavigate the world on sun power alone (it began its journey across the U.S. this morning)

800,000 tonnes: the amount of garbage Norway imported from Sweden last year (yes, Norway is running out of garbage, and it's a problem)

$5: the cost to turn every screen in your home into a touchscreen

10,000: the number of atoms IBM Research scientists moved, one at a time, to create the world's tiniest stop-motion film

800 pounds: the weight of a solar-powered, student-designed tank that will explore the wilds of Greenland

10: the number of International Bitterness Units in the average American lager

2,275: the number of houses destroyed by the Nigerian army last month, revealed by satellite images. The Nigerian military had claimed it only burned 30 homes.

15 million: the estimated number of Americans who suffer from compulsive hoarding

959: the number of individual cells in this open-source virtual worm

11 billion: the number of gallons of untreated or partially treated waste that sewage plants dumped into waterways after Hurricane Sandy (that's the equivalent of NYC's Central Park, packed 41 feet high with untreated sewage)

24: the number of robot arms on Chile's Very Large Telescope, which will observe what the universe was like when it was much younger

100: the number of balloons an awesome DIY laser tore through in one shot (watch them pop in reverse!)

165 feet: the length of the world's longest upside-down roller-coaster drop (the terrifying Gatekeeper ride mimics the sensation of riding on the wing of a plane)

More than 780 million people rely on kerosene to light their homes. But the fuel is pricey and is toxic when burned-not to mention a fire hazard. In 2008, London-based product designer Martin Riddiford and his colleague Jim Reeves decided to create a cheap, safe alternative.

Riddiford knew a falling weight could produce enough energy to run a grandfather clock, so why not a light? To find out, he attached the crank of a wind-up flashlight to a bicycle wheel. He hung a weight from the wheel to cause it to spin; the wheel cranked the flashlight, and the device lit up.

Over the next four years, Riddiford, Reeves, and a small team spent their downtime between projects in a basement, refining the GravityLight. To use it, a person hangs the device and fills an attached fabric bag with up to 28 pounds of rocks, dirt, or other material. Lifting and releasing the bag steadily pulls a notched belt through GravityLight's plastic hub; the belt spins a series of gears to drive a small motor, which continuously powers an LED for about 30 minutes.

The team used crowdfunding to manufacture 1,000 GravityLights, which it plans to send to developing countries for field testing-plus 6,000 more for backers. "It's exciting to witness so much positive reaction to what we're doing," Riddiford says. Besides remote villages, the lamp could prove handy in campsites, closets, and any dark nook far from a socket, so Riddiford also hopes to license a retail version for less than $10.

HOW IT WORKS

1) As a weighted bag descends, it tugs a belt to turn a series of plastic gears.
2) The gears work in unison to spin an electric motor.
3) The motor powers a small yet bright LED, providing continuous illumination for about 30 minutes-the maximum amount of time that the bag can take to descend.
4) External connectors can power low-voltage devices, and the entire system is designed to work for thousands of lift-and-drop cycles.

INVENTORS
Jim Reeves, Martin Riddiford

COMPANY
Therefore

INVENTION
GravityLight

COST TO DEVELOP
More than $300,000

MATURITY
8/10

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 Invention Awards section here, and see all of our May issue here.

You know when you're eating frosting straight out of the can and you're thinking, "I don't even really like this flavor," but you keep on eating? (It's a dark, but human, moment. We understand.) Well, now one study is offering an explanation for why. Compared to calorie-free foods, foods with calories in them hit the human brain with big effects, even if people don't appear to consciously like the flavors all that much.

There appear to be two unrelated brain circuits that kick into gear when people consume things, Dana Small, a Yale University psychologist who studies people's responses to food and one of the scientists who performed this study, tells Popular Science. There's one that's related to consciously liking flavors. And then there's another that responds to glucose in the blood, which is an indicator of that person's metabolism of food. "The thing the brain really cares about are the calories," Small says.

Small's study comes after a few years of research into mice, rats and fruit flies have found that the animals are able to sense nutrition independently of taste. Over and over, researchers have genetically engineered lab animals not to be able to taste sweetness, and yet, over time, the animals learn to prefer mixtures containing real sugar instead of artificial sweetener.

Over time, animals learn to prefer mixtures containing real sugar instead of artificial sweetener.

You can't genetically engineer a person not to be able to taste, so Small and her research team instead had people drink artificially flavored drinks. Some of the drinks were calorie-free, while others contained maltodextrin, a carbohydrate that people can't taste, but still has calories.

In a series of experiments, the Yale psychologists found that over three weeks' time, people come to like the flavor paired with maltodextrin more, even though they couldn't taste the added carbohydrate. Still, they only increased their liking from "mildly pleasant" at the start of the study to "moderately pleasant" at the end of the study.

The researchers saw a larger effect when they took functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of people's brains while they sipped the different flavors. Although they gave everyone 112.5 calories' worth of maltodextrin in their caloric drinks, different people have different metabolisms, so people's blood sugar levels differed after drinking their maltodextrin drink. The researchers saw that two regions in the brain, the hypothalamus and the nucleus accumbens, responded to the drinks in such a way that people with more blood glucose after drinking had more of a brain response. Small has done other research that suggests that responses in the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens are related to risk for obesity.

Meanwhile, the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens responses weren't related to how much people said they liked their drinks. "Overall, the results suggested that there's a real tight metabolic control of flavor reinforcement," Small says. "So it's metabolism controlling the mind, in a way." Pretty weird.

Small's idea is that people who overeat don't necessarily like calorie-dense foods more. Instead, some people may be more at risk for overeating because their blood glucose levels-and brains-are reacting more strongly than other people's. This isn't an idea for the textbooks yet. People are still working out the exact mechanisms in mice, much less people.

Still, Small thinks it makes evolutionary sense. "All of these brain circuits evolved millions of years ago in animals that lacked consciousness but still needed to incorporate fuel," she says. "From our research, it appears that those unconscious circuits that are caring about that energy are alive and well in our brains."

You can find her new study in the journal Current Biology.

Earth is bombarded all the time by space rocks, but people rarely notice them--only 1,042 have ever been seen falling. People didn't start recording these impacts until a couple hundred years ago, and then suddenly, they noticed all the time.

Data designer Carlo Zapponi has a lovely new animation, Bolides, showing all these recorded impacts, along with every known meteorite fall--most of which weren't seen when they happened. The information comes from The Meteorite Bulletin, which is maintained by the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society. The word "bolide" comes from the Greek word for missile, and is used to describe bright fireballs.

The database doesn't yet include the giant Chelyabinsk meteorite, which fell over Russia earlier this year. But it's still fun to explore meteorite falls by size and watch Earth get bombarded through time. Go here to see the animation for yourself.

Most independent inventors don't have bottomless bank accounts. To fund their dreams, many innovators are appealing to strangers on the Web for help. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler weighs in on this growing source of grassroots venture capital.

How does crowdfunding work?
Traditional funding channels support things with the potential to create revenue-you're looking for hits. On Kickstarter, people fund the ideas that they think should exist. People have always had great ideas, and others have always wanted to be a part of them. We've made a space where that can happen on a massive scale.

The JOBS Act allows people not just to back projects, but also buy equity in them. Will that benefit both inventors and crowdfunders?
Kickstarter won't switch to an equity-based model. We believe the real disruption comes from people supporting things because they like them, rather than finding things that produce a good return on investment.

What do you hope-and expect-will happen with crowdfunding over the next five years?
The ultimate goal is that in five years, Kickstarter looks largely the same-but the rest of the world looks a lot more like Kickstarter. We're already seeing that happen, in the sense that there are now things all around us that were created by us and by our peers.

Do you think the growth of crowdfunding and the growth of hackerspaces is connected?
That's an area we really love: The two dudes with an interesting idea they want to try to create. The degree of transparency that happens with a Kickstarter project is really remarkable. That's not something that has ever existed before-that you actually see how something you use was made and really be a part of it.

On Kickstarter, inventors develop and build projects in a very public forum. What's the benefit of being so open?
You come to Kickstarter not just to raise money, but to build a community around your project. Money gets spent, but a community will last forever if you do your job right. And those people will cheerlead you all along the way and give you feedback and be there for your next thing. That's a true asset.

Yancey Strickler is a co-founder of Kickstarter, which has funneled more than $435 million from the site's users to about 37,000 projects. Strickler has personally backed nearly 800 projects on Kickstarter.

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health is turning its back on the so-called bible of its field. In a statement, the institute said it will start doing research in a way that ignores the categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is commonly known as the "DSM," plus a number to indicate the edition. This just weeks before the American Psychiatric Association plans to published the fifth (and controversial) edition of the DSM.

Instead of diagnosing patients based on symptoms such as depressed mood and fatigue, the institute wants to use more quantitative data, such as genetic or brain-imaging data, in diagnoses. Such a shift would bring mental health diagnoses to par with diagnoses in other health fields, according to the institute's statement. Most other fields abandoned symptom-based diagnosis after the middle of the last century, but not psychiatry. After all, some of the proposed lab measures for mental health, such as genetics and brain images, weren't even measurable until recently. It took technology a while to catch up to the kinds of data that may be associated with mental health disorders.

"We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system," institute director Thomas Insel said in the statement.

The change will affect researchers the most, as they may have to structure their studies differently to get National Institute of Mental Health funding and view their work in a different way. A decade or more down the line, however, it may mean more precise diagnoses and better treatments for patients.

For now, Insel said, psychiatrists will continue to give their patients diagnoses based on the DSM because there's not enough research yet on what they could use instead.

Asbestos is an insidious killer, with a nasty habit of being most deadly when it is least visible. Fortunately, a new device can detect asbestos on site, without a lab test.

Popular in construction because of its fire-retardant properties, asbestos is mostly harmless if left alone. However, friction or other damage can make asbestos-containing products release asbestos fibers into the air, which are tiny, thin, and carcinogenic. Inhaled asbestos fibers increase the risk of lung disease, especially mesothelioma, which is a cancer than can wait as long as 40 years after exposure to strike the lungs and heart, and generally proves fatal within a year of development.

The best way to not get mesothelioma is to avoid asbestos exposure, but that's not always possible for people working in building demolition, repairing ancient car brakes, or doing the dirty job of renovating old, probably-asbestos-containing buildings so they are safe for new occupants. In those instances, it's helpful to find out if there's loose asbestos in the air, and it's best to do so as quick as possible.

At the University of Hertfordshire in England, researchers made a new sensor that can detect asbestos in the air on site, without having to send samples back to a lab for a evaluation, which is expensive and time-consuming. The key to their device? The inherent magnetic nature of asbestos.

The sensor works in three stages. First, you shine a laser on a stream of airborne particles. Light bounces off the particles in complex patterns that help scientists "detect single airborne fibers that are far too small to be seen with the naked eye," researcher Paul Kaye says. Then you pull the stream of airborne particles through a magnetic field. On the opposite side, you shine lasers through the same air stream. If the fibers align with the magnetic field, they are probably asbestos.

These sensors will likely be on sale in 12 to 18 months, and at an expected price of $800, they should be affordable for construction companies and even some larger-scale residential renovation projects.

[medGadget]

The central principle of quantum mechanics--that the act of measuring a quantum object actually changes it--has some pretty amazing potential in the world of cryptography. And Los Alamos National Laboratory just revealed that it has been using a new design of quantum cryptography setup for more than two years.

Quantum cryptography isn't new; the potential for completely secure transmission has been enough to attract lots of development efforts from banks and governments. You can even buy a fairly simple system right now. And these are literally completely secure; any attempt to eavesdrop is necessarily obvious, because the mere act of eavesdropping physically changes the transmission. But that means that quantum encryption has, until now, been exclusively a one-to-one connection, as over a single line. Networks haven't been possible.

But Los Alamos has pioneered what they're calling a "quantum internet." I'll let Technology Review explain it:

But scalability becomes a problem as the network gets more and more complex. The solution?

It's a pretty fascinating setup--we'll definitely keep an eye on quantum cryptography as it develops.

[Technology Review]

A couple high school seniors in Michigan recently rigged a junior's locker to open with the wave of a hand, the Livingston Daily reported. It's not a mean trick: The redesign helps Nick Torrance, a Pinckney Community High School junior who has muscular dystrophy, open and close his own locker.

Torrance has a sensor attached to the right arm of his wheelchair, and he waves his hand over that to work his locker. He likes the opener, he told the Livingston Daily. He otherwise has a fellow student assigned to carry his books, jacket and put things away in his locker.

The idea for the opener came from his occupational therapist, Amy Uphouse, who initially thought you had to be able to buy a locker-opening device somewhere. She couldn't find one, however, so she asked the school's robotics teacher, Sean Hickman, if other students could make one. Hickman recruited seniors Micah Stuhldreher and Wyatt Smrcka, who won first place in the SkillsUSA national robotics competition last year and are competing again this year.

Like in any device development, it took a lot of trial and error for Stuhldreher and Smrcka to make something that would work for their target audience. For example, they initially built a locker-opening button, but Torrance wasn't strong enough to push it, so they replaced it with a sensor.

Torrance didn't comment much in the Livingston Daily article, nor at all in the accompanying video. He is shy, the newspaper reported. That's understandable. So the paper talked to his mom, Jean Torrance, too. But did they have to include this line? "He wants to talk to girls; he's at that age," the Livingston Daily quotes her as saying about her 18-year-old son. 1) We're not sure what this has to do with the sensor-activated locker. 2) Mom, that's such an embarrassing thing to say!

[Livingston Daily]

It started with a crowdfunding project last August. Now, nine months later, the world's first 3-D printed gun is here. Announced via Forbes exclusive on Friday, the design, called the Liberator, is now available for download.

Here are what the parts look like:

Before making a complete 3-D printed gun, Defense Distributed tested a printed part of an assault rifle. In December, the test version fired 6 shots (out of a magazine of 10) before breaking. Defense Distributed have been refining their technology since, adapting to the needs of the material--by curving the plastic wherever possible to strengthen it against stress that broke square parts and thickening the plastic so that it better absorbs force. A later design, demonstrated in February, fired 600 rounds just fine. With a firearms manufacturing license in March, Defense Distributed was legally in the clear to make a 3-D printed gun they could sell.

In this latest demo, there are 16 3-D printed plastic components. A sharp eye will notice one metal component (besides the bullet): a cheap nail. This is the firing pin, which accelerates into the back of the round, setting of the explosion that propels the bullet forward. Defense Distributed tried to make a hardened plastic firing pin, but they were unable to do so with the commercial printer that they used to make the rest of the Liberator, and so rather than use an industrial printer they went with a cheap, everyday component.

The bullet is a .380 caliber, a size in use for ever a century and common in handguns. Why the .380? "It was the first one that worked," Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson told Popular Science. There are plans for 9mm and .22 caliber barrels as well.

The two coiled spirals and the weird, accordion-looking piece are all actually springs, made entirely of printed plastic. The spirals cock the accordion into position. The accordion is the trigger spring, that when released pushes the firing pin forward with enough force to set off the round.

Not visible in the picture is a nonfunctional 6-ounce piece of metal that goes in the handle and makes the gun visible to metal detectors, designed to meet the standards of the Undetectable Firearms Act. Wilson said he was interested in the printable quality of the gun, not the undetectable aspects of it, and while carefully noting hisType 7 License for firearms manufacture doesn't require it, he made it detectable as a gesture of good will. Because this is optional, other people who choose to download the plans and print their own Liberators may not follow suit. (Fiction, at least, has already seen the dangerous potential of undetected guns).

Is this the future of 3D printing? Wilson told the BBC:

"There are states all over the world outside of the United States say we're a gun control state, you can't own a firearm. That's not true anymore. I'm seeing a world where technology says you'll be pretty much be able to have whatever you want."

You can watch the Liberator in action here:

The Liberator, the 3-D printed gun that we reported on earlier today, is proof-of-concept for an inevitable and dangerous idea: what happens to anti-gun legislation when people can just make weapons in their homes?

3-D printers are only getting cheaper, and the tremendous economic potential of 3-D printing should make legislators cautious when reacting to a technology that offers everything from new ears to custom prosthetics to electric racecars, to say nothing of the amazing potential 3-D printers offer at-home manufacturing.

While there are already politicians seeking a legislative solution to 3-D printed guns, it might be best to look at this as an edge case, an inevitable unintended use, but one that won't define the market. Fertilizer, pressure cookers, and cell phones are all everyday appliances that can be used to make deadly explosives, but the overwhelming benefits from these technologies is so positive, and their use as instruments of harm, while existent, is so rare that it would be absurd to try and ban them outright.

We shouldn't be looking at this narrowly as "3-D printed gun poses a new threat"; individuals making guns at home predates 3-D printing by centuries, and people in conflict zones make them without the aid of a 3-D printer to this day. Not to understate the significance of a potentially undetectable home-printed gun, but the impact such weapons will have on society is far less than the one 3-D printing as a whole will have. The technology that is revolutionary here is the 3-D printing.

Nectar-feeding bats have the highest metabolism among mammals, burning half their body fat every day, and therefore they must eat pretty much all the time. To sip their food efficiently, the bats have evolved special tongue-hairs that help them grab as much sweet nectar as they can with every lick. This finding, made possible with high-speed video, could lead to potential new designs for medical equipment.

The bat tongues work like a mammal penis, engorging with blood to become stiff.The bat in this case is Glossophaga soricina, or Pallas's long-tongued bat, which lives in Central and South America. Biologists already knew it had a hairy tongue, but they thought these fibers were passive, just hanging out when the tongue is lolling around, explained Cally J. Harper, the lead researcher on this new study. She found they're active, engorging with blood and changing their orientation to serve as little nectar-scoops.

"When we get cold, the hair on our arms sticks straight up--it's sort of like that, except that hair erection is powered by muscle, and in this case it's powered by blood vessels," Harper told Popular Science.

Another analogy: The bat tongues work like a mammal penis, engorging with blood to become stiff. Only much, much faster.

Harper used a Phantom v10 high-speed camera to film the bats feeding at 500 frames per second. Slowed down, the video clearly shows the tongue fibers--they're called papillae--stretching out perpendicular to the rest of the muscle. It happens whether or not the bats actually stick their tongues in the nectar, which shows it's not a passive response to surface tension. This is a hydraulic process--the same process that makes a starfish leg move, and the same process that makes the penis erect in mammals.

"When we were first thinking about this, we were like, ‘there's no way that these tongues could be hydraulic.' Most structures that are hydraulic tend to be slow," Harper said. "The limbs in starfish, the penis erection mechanism in mammals, is really slow, but this happened in 40 milliseconds."

She and her colleagues at Brown University tested it on tongues excised from dead bats. They injected the tongues with saline as a proxy for blood, and found as the tongue flicks out, it grows thinner as it elongates. As those muscles contract and increase the tongue's length, they squeeze blood (or saline) into the tips of the papillae: A hydraulic process. "It's a two-for-one," Harper explains.

Plenty of other mammals use powerful tongues to force liquid into their mouths--high-speed video of dogs and cats show their curled tongues forcing columns of liquid upward. But when our pets drink, lots of liquid falls back into the bowl (or onto the floor). Not so for the bats, Harper said. Nectar droplets are caught among the papillae, and much more liquid gets into the bats' mouths. This is an evolutionary advantage that can explain why such a complex structure would exist in only a couple species. The Pallas bat's closest relative also has the tongue hairs, she added.

Hummingbirds also have unique tongue structures to help them obtain the maximum amount of nectar possible. It stands to reason that nectar-feeding bats, which have a similar metabolism, would also have some tongue tricks.

Harper--who defends her graduate thesis tomorrow--was interested in how mammal tongues work during feeding, and decided to focus on the bats because of the unusual hairs. But now she wants to turn the finding into potential new medical devices. A device that can hydraulically change its shape and structure could be useful for a whole host of surgical procedures, she explained.

"Technology modeled after these tongues could be especially useful for keeping blood vessels open during surgery, or keeping portions of the intestine open," she said. "In some of the technology that's out there for angioplasty and gastric surgery, the tools are made of these metal, rigid materials. I think it would be really great if we could make a medical tool that was soft and flexible, and could possibly minimize damage to blood vessels."

Harper's paper is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Verizon will not rebuild its copper-line telephone network in Mantoloking, N.J., a community of about 300 that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy, Asbury Park Press reports. Instead, the company is offering residents a new service called Verizon Voice Link, which connects wired and cordless phones to the Verizon Wireless network.

Verizon Voice Link won't be vulnerable to unpredictable-but-common accidents like cars hitting telephone poles and trees falling on utility wires. According to Verizon, installation is free, and prices are the same as or less than what customers were paying for landline service.

How it works: A technician plugs a small antenna box into an electrical socket and telephone jack in the customer's home. Phone calls are then made over the Verizon Wireless network, rather than via copper telephone lines. In case of a power outage, three AA batteries keep the device going for 36 hours.

Mantoloking is the first town in New Jersey, and one of just a few areas in the U.S., to get the new service. About 30 residents have already signed up, Verizon says.

Read about more smart ideas to build cities that storms can't cripple.

Single dudes: Are you holding a guitar at this moment? If not, you are not reaching your Maximum Attractiveness Potential, according to two (2) recently published studies.

A French study that was just published suggests women are more attracted to a guy hefting around a guitar, and that supports another study published in Israel last year.

Here's the French study:

Specifically, researchers took an incredibly gutsy 20-year-old actor and had him introduce himself to 300 young women between about 18 and 22, say "I think you're really pretty," and ask for each of their numbers. One-third of the time he was carrying a guitar case, one-third of the time a sports bag, and one-third of the time nothing. About 31 percent of the women gave him their number when he had the guitar, compared to nine percent when he had the gym bag and 14 percent when he was carrying nothing.

In the study out of Israel, researchers had a Facebook profile with a photo of a man send friend requests to 100 single female students at Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University. Half the time, the profile featured a boring non-guitar guy, and half the time the profile had a dude strumming a guitar. Only five out of 50 accepted the request from the guitar-less profile, but 14 out of 50 responded positively to the profile with the guitar.

Note: you don't actually need to play the guitar, apparently. Just carry it around with you and wait for the ladies to hurl their numbers at you.

[Pacific Standard]

"Now You Can Fly Around The World," by John E. Lodge and excerpted below, originally appeared in the June 1936 issue of Popular Science magazine. The Hindenburg airship crashed May 6, 1937.

Out of the sky over Lakehurst, N. J., a few days hence, the enormous silver Von Hindenburg, biggest Zeppelin ever built, is scheduled to nose down for a landing at the end of its maiden voyage to America. Not many weeks later, the four-engined, twenty-five-ton China Clipper will head out past the promontories of the Golden Gate on its first passenger flight to the Orient.

Those two events will forge the final links in a vast chain of airways to encircle the globe. Before the end of this summer, you will be able to buy tickets for an aerial circuit of the earth as easily as you now purchase them for a round-the-world cruise by steamer. Years of preparation, the flights of daring pioneers, and the latest advances in engineering and radio have given a solid foundation to what, but a few short decades ago, was a seemingly impossible dream.

You will be able to buy tickets for an aerial circuit of the earth as easily as you now purchase them for a round-the-world cruise by steamer.

It is only sixty-four years since Jules Verne's classic "Around the World in Eighty Days" appeared in American bookshops. That imaginary circuit of the globe initiated a long series of real-life dashes by train, automobile, boat, and aircraft. Beginning with Nellie Ely's seventy-two day journey, in 1889, and ending with Wiley Post's eight-day flight, in 1933, these races against the clock have dramatized the advancing speed of transportation.

Such stunts, however, were pioneering trips far beyond the reach of the ordinary person. Now, on regular air lines, it will be possible to fly around the world in comfort, following the trail of Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg by air. In twenty flying days, and for the price of a high-class automobile, you can make the journey.

The Lakehurst field is the scene of the start. Under the glare of searchlights, the giant Von Hindenburg towers higher than a ten-story building and stretches across the field for a distance greater than three and a half city blocks. With nearly fifty other passengers, as well as a crew of forty, you climb aboard the transatlantic Zeppelin. In your stateroom, you find a comfortable bed, electric lights, hot and cold running water. Overhead, the great gas cells hold 7,000,000 cubic feet of helium, enough to lift a weight equal to half a mile of automobiles lashed bumper to bumper!

There is a final inspection, then, at midnight, the command: "Up Ship!"

There is a final inspection, then, at midnight, the command: "Up Ship!" The mooring cables drop away, and majestically the immense, silver cigar rises into the air. Almost noiselessly, its four 1,300-horse-power Diesel engines begin spinning their huge propellers. The ship gathers speed. The lights of Lakehurst drop to the rear. At eighty miles an hour, you are heading for the coast. Half an hour later, the vast cluster of pin-point lights marking New York City has slipped beneath you and faded away behind.

The sky liner is taking the great-circle route to Europe, following the trail of Lindbergh. In stormy weather, it would head across for the Azores along a "bad-weather route," 600 miles longer but out of the path of the northern gales. Sunrise finds you well up the coast, and mid-afternoon reveals the rocks of Newfoundland below. By evening, you are out over the Atlantic
making the "down-hill run" to Europe. With prevailing winds at her tail, the big ship rushes on, hour after hour. An occasional steamer, the gleaming peak of an iceberg, alone break the monotony of tossing water. You have time to examine the great aerial hotel on which you are riding, to see the smoking rooms, the shower baths, the electric ranges, and even the full-size grand piano it carries.

By evening of the second day, you are gliding across Belgium, up the Rhine to the new airship shed at Frankfort on the Main. Forty-seven hours after leaving Lakehurst, you step down at the European airport. The fare for this 3,900-mile, transatlantic trip via the airways is $400.

Read the rest of the story in the June 1936 issue of Popular Science. Then, read about a daring new plan for the future of airships.

A petition created late last week on the White House's very serious petitions site requests that Google Glass be banned nationwide "until clear limitations are placed to prevent indecent public surveillance." The fear articulated in the petition is that a Glass-wearer will be able to record without a subject knowing, even in potentially sensitive places like public bathrooms.

The problem with Google Glass as a potential privacy or security risk is much subtler and smaller than petitioners like this imagine. Google Glass records only what's in roughly the wearer's field of vision. That means that to record someone at a urinal, a voyeur wearing Google Glass would have to stand there and stare at that person, without moving, for the length of the video. Video quality, too, is not stellar; certainly not as good as video taken by your phone. And it's a giant, hugely noticeable pair of spaceman glasses.

That said, it's hard to get too angry at these folks for wanting to at least discuss the issue of surveillance. Google Glass is, I'd argue, a less efficient surveillance device than a smartphone, except for one thing: you don't have to extract it from a pocket or bag. And it is dangerous to take too strong of a position that Google Glass is an innocent device constructed of sci-fi dreams and good intentions; I don't think banning is really the right move, but it's certainly important to talk about.

Is Glass moving us one step closer to constant surveillance? That largely remains to be seen; Glass is a very early platform, sort of like a beta version of the very first iPhone back in 2007. It has no apps, it can do only very basic first-party things, and while it's something very new, we don't really know how it'll be used in the culture at large. Privacy advocates will and should make a stink about it; that's the only way to prevent something scary from happening. Attention from these folks might force Google to adjust; I don't see any reason not to include a blinking red "recording" light, for example.

Privacy advocates will and should make a stink about it.The petition uses the word "indecent" to describe the kind of dastardly surveillance that the government should be banning, which suggests sex or nudity. The greater risk is in something more subtle and less rooted in personal discomfort. Glass, remember, only records what the wearer is looking at. That makes it lousy for peeping toms, but much better for surreptitiously recording conversations, provided the person being recorded doesn't notice the tiny reverse image of him/herself displayed in the little glass cube on the front of the device.

Glass is a much worse way of recording that kind of situation than, say, a traditional wire recorder comprised of a microphone and hidden camera, because it couldn't be less hidden. But if Glass and the wearable computers that follow become mainstream, they'll become inconspicuous. That's what happened to smartphones; in 2006, if you placed a tiny glass and metal rectangle on the table between you and a guest while eating dinner, your conversation would be entirely about that. Now, it's barely rude, and can record voice just as well as any standalone digital voice recorder.

This particular petition has, at the time of writing, four signatures. It needs 99,996 to reach its goal, and, um, it might not. Certainly it's unlikely that the government will federally ban Google Glass. But if it gets Google to see things its way even a little, that'd be a success.

You know Mexican drug cartels are responsible for terrible violence south of the U.S. border, but the groups have plenty of people in the U.S., too. A new map of cartels' influence in the U.S. shows that they even run large grow-ops in the west, as far north as Oregon and Washington.

The map, from the National Post, uses data from the National Drug Intelligence Center (which closed in 2012), the National Seizure System and the Justice in Mexico Project. Cartels appear in nearly all states, where they often work with the gangs that sell drugs to final consumers. Cartel presence is most common in cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and on the East Coast between Boston and Washington, D.C.

Demand for drugs in the U.S. is rising and Mexican cartels are ready to supply them, the National Post reported. That supply comes at a price back home. Below the map, graphics show the numbers of deaths in Mexico associated with the cartels. Visit the National Post to see the entire map.

[National Post]

During a professional snowmobiling race in 2008, Mike Schultz lost control of his machine while speeding over a ragged stretch of snow. His left foot hit the ground so hard that his leg hyperextended nearly all the way in the wrong direction, shattering his knee and forcing doctors to amputate just above the joint. "I'm looking at my wife saying, ‘What are we going to do now?' " Schultz says. "I'm a professional athlete, and I'm not going to be able to do this stuff anymore."

Schultz's instinct was right: Conventional prosthetic legs couldn't stand up to his high-impact lifestyle. So in early 2009, he designed and built a limb that could. Its key feature was the Moto Knee, which uses an adjustable 250psi mountain bike shock absorber to regulate the joint's stiffness with compressed air. But snowboarders and skateboarders also require critical toe pressure and ankle tension, so Schultz added the Versa Foot-a foot-ankle assembly that also uses a pneumatic shock absorber to emulate joint resistance. Together, the two parts complete an artificial lower limb that's impact-resistant, waterproof, and quickly customizable for a range of high-performance activities.

Schultz recently returned to competition and won a gold medal at the 2013 X Games Aspen. This spring, he expects to sell his new-and-improved prosthetic not only to amputee atheletes, but also to soldiers returning from conflicts with missing limbs. "This whole project started out because I wanted to allow myself to do the things I wanted to do, but it's evolved way past that," Schultz says. "I'm helping people do things they haven't done since they had two good legs, and that's worth it right there."

INVENTOR
Mike Schultz

COMPANY
Biodapt

INVENTION
Versa Foot

COST TO DEVELOP
$15,000

MATURITY
9/10

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 Invention Awards section here, and see all of our May issue here.