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Is this the era of C. instagram? That's the clever name of a cellphone photo one undergraduate took of a plate crawling with C. elegans (it kind of rhymes). Caenorhabditis elegans are microscopic worms that scientists commonly use to study genetics.

The student, Meredith Wright of Princeton University, initially snapped the picture after seeing the plate in lab and thinking it was "particularly lovely," she wrote in an explanation accompanying her photo.

Later, she submitted her image to Princeton's Art of Science contest. Princeton then picked 43 images, including hers, to display in the Friend Center campus. Click here for a look at some our favorites.

1,350 light-years: the distance to a "fiery ribbon" stretching across the Orion Nebula, captured recently by a submillimeter-wavelength camera inside Chile's Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope. The ribbon is actually a glow given off by cold interstellar dust at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see.

4: the number of toes you need on each foot

8 weeks: the time it took a team of nerds to create real-life Mario Kart, complete with bananas, shells, and mushrooms

2016: the launch year of a NASA spacecraft that will land on the asteroid Bennu, scoop up two ounces of its soil, and then fly the sample back to Earth. Scientists hope the soil will offer clues to the birth of the solar system and life on Earth.

11:18 a.m. ET: the time on May 14, 2013, at which the X-47B autonomous warplane became the first unmanned aircraft to ever complete a catapult launch from the deck of an aircraft carrier (video below)

2.64 billion years: the length of time that water discovered in a Canadian mine may have been untouched by Earth's atmosphere. The stream may be the oldest free-flowing source of isolated water ever known.

500 miles: the distance a robot plane flew over Europe carrying human passengers

2013: the year scientists created the first cloned human embryo

1,500 watts: the power of the metal-halide vapor lamps in the U.S. Army's brutal weather simulator, the only lab of its kind to use human test subjects (the lamps are so bright, it's impossible to look directly at them)

$10.7 million: the amount Google has just invested in a drone intelligence company

3,600 degrees Fahrenheit: the temperature on the surface of a distant, massive gas planet, which scientists recently discovered using Einstein's theory of relativity

40 million miles: the distance from Earth to NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, discoverer of distant worlds large and small. The beloved telescope suffered a critical failure this week, though there might still be a way to save it.

$300: the price of an animatronic robot kit designed to teach anyone robotics, one of the coolest inventions of the year

4,000: the number of teeth an American alligator can regenerate during its life. Dentists are studying the giant reptiles to figure out a way for humans to regrow teeth.

$50,000: the price of a sleek, comfortable space suit for space tourists

13,000: the number of customers the space tourism industry is expected to have by 2021. Scientists are warning that commercial spaceflights could fill the stratosphere with sunlight-absorbing black carbon.

2.2 millionths of a second: the lifespan of a muon, a negatively charged subatomic particle (scientists need a 600-ton, 50-foot-diameter magnet to measure them)

0.05 percent: the blood-alcohol content to which all states should lower their threshold for DUI, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (all states currently have a blood-alcohol limit of 0.08 percent for driving)

5 hours: the time it takes to build your own gene machine, a pipe that copies DNA using the heat of a lightbulb

A new study in the journal Psychological Science took a look at the relationship between physical strength and political beliefs. More specifically, the study sought to answer a question: is there any correlation between "fighting ability" and opinions on redistribution of wealth?

Conducted by researchers at Denmark's Aarhus University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study surveyed subjects by upper-body strength, socioeconomic status, and then compared those with the subject's response to a questionnaire about economic redistribution. The hypothesis: men with more upper-body strength would be less open to economic redistribution. And it turned out to be true, to an extent, depending on socioeconomic status. From an evolutionary biology perspective, the idea is that physical strength would enable a man (and it is gender-specific, as I'll get to in a sec) to hold and protect property, making him less likely to support sharing with the group.

"Our results demonstrate that physically weak males are more reluctant than physically strong males to assert their self-interest - just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation among small numbers of individuals, rather than abstract electoral dynamics among millions," says one of the lead researchers.

Socioeconomic status also showed a correlation with economic views. As expected, rich men were generally opposed to redistribution, and poor men generally in favor of it. Men with stronger upper bodies tended to have stronger views--rich, strong men were very much opposed to redistribution, while less strong but still rich men were less opposed. On the side of those that support redistribution, the trend was reversed: poorer but strong men were strongly in favor of redistribution, while weaker poor men were not as committed.

Women, on the other hand, showed no correlation between strength and economic views at all.

Check out the full study here.

Parasites of parasites-sometimes called hyperparasites-seem to be quite common. In fact, parasites of parasites are themselves prone to parasites, leading to what might appear to be an endless progression of interspecies abuse.

Studies in the lab and field have identified some of these elaborate, nested relationships. Last November, a team of researchers in the Netherlands published research on a wasp that lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, which in turn feeds on cabbage leaves. That means the nutrients and energy pass through three distinct organisms, and the same lab has documented related systems with even more layers of interaction.

Seth Bordenstein, a microbiologist at Vanderbilt University, studies a five-tiered system that starts with a fledgling bird. Blowflies infest the bird's underside with bloodsucking larvae, which then drop off and fall prey to hyperparasitic wasps. The wasps, in turn, carry a parasitic bacterium called Wolbachia, which has evolved to modify its host's reproductive system. The bacteria are subject to their own invasion, though, from tiny viruses known as bacteriophages, which hijack Wolbachia's cellular machinery to expand their population.

Just how small can parasites get? The final layer of these systems might be the transposon, which is a roving bit of nucleic acid-a single, parasitic gene. Transposons have been discovered inside viruses that infect other viruses, which in turn infect amoebas that infect human beings. "I think it's difficult to see where one organism begins and another one ends," Bordenstein says. "We are only beginning to appreciate how intertwined these layers of organisms are in large flora and fauna."

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

Wind turbines extract kinetic energy from the air around them, and since less energy makes for weaker winds, turbines do indeed make it less windy. Technically speaking, the climate zone right behind a turbine (or behind all the turbines on a wind farm) experiences what's called a "wind speed vacuum," or a "momentum deficit." In other words, the air slows down.

The effect has implications for wind-farm efficiency. Upwind turbines in a densely packed farm may weaken the breeze before it reaches the downwind ones. It could even have a more general impact. If wind farms were constructed on a truly massive scale, their cumulative momentum deficit could conceivably alter wind speeds on a global scale (though how winds would change is complex-they'd likely slow in places and speed up in others).

Wind farms can also affect the local temperature. According to Somnath Baidya Roy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois, as a breeze passes over a wind farm, the turbines create an atmospheric wake where wind speeds drop and turbulence increases. The rotors spawn a set of eddies that mix air from above with air from below. The eddies can lift cool air and sink warm air or vice-versa. That turbulence could raise or lower local temperatures. In a paper published in 2012, one group of researchers studied areas over several wind farms in Texas and found that local surface temperatures had risen by a small but significant amount.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com or tweet @popsci hashtag #PopSciFYI.

Curiosity may be everyone's favorite Mars robot these days, but it has a long way to rove if it's going to catch up to the Mars rover Opportunity. Last week, Opportunity traversed 263 feet of Martian frontier near Endeavour Crater, bringing its total trip odometer up to 22.22 miles--the longest distance ever traveled by a NASA vehicle on the surface of a planet not named Earth.

Opportunity isn't surpassing another robotic rover. During Apollo 17, Eugene Cernan and Harrision Schmitt drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle 22.21 miles over the lunar surface. That was in 1972--so suffice it to say, it's taken NASA a while to cover the same amount of ground on Mars as we did during the Apollo missions, albeit under much different and more challenging circumstances.

But with this milestone Opportunity still isn't the most traveled surface vehicle in the non-Earth solar system. That distinction belongs to the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 robotic rover, which covered 23 miles of lunar surface in 1973. But that record is poised to fall to Opportunity in the coming weeks as well. This week the rover embarked on a multi-week journey from the area where it has been working for a couple of years now toward a target known as "Solander Point" about 1.4 miles away. Expect Opportunity to hit another space exploration distance milestone any day now.

[JPL]

Remember the 80-degree days and early daffodils last March? It wasn't just an early spring. For much of the U.S., it was the earliest spring since 1900, when systematic weather records became available for the entire U.S., according to a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey.

The central and eastern U.S. saw spring come 20 to 30 days early, the study says, although the effect wasn't uniform across the country: The northwest and southern parts of Florida had unusually late springs in 2012.

It's very difficult to attribute any one weather event to global warming, but climate change may bring early springs more often in the future, survey scientists wrote in their study.

While seeing the sun sooner in the year was fun, the early spring of 2012 had some ill effects. The New York Times reported insects appearing early and increased pollen allergies in some states. The state of Michigan sustained $500 million in fruit crop damage after an April frost destroyed the early flowerings of trees, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

How exactly did survey scientists calculate the arrival of spring? They used measures from phenology, the science of when annual stuff happens in living things. (Not to be confused with phrenology.) Flowers blooming, birds migrating and deciduous trees re-leafing are all examples of phenology measures. U.S. scientists began making such observations on a larger scale in the 1950s, while hobbyists had kept flower diaries for decades before that. Now, the USA National Phenology Network, which includes a website where non-scientists are able to submit their observations, helps scientists keep track of the signs of spring.

Because unusual seasons are so disruptive to agriculture, scientists want to develop ways of predicting when an early spring will occur. That may be possible by correlating historical phenology records with atmospheric phenomena, such as the movement of pressure systems, survey scientists wrote in their paper. They published their work May 14 in the journal Eos.

Dolphins have been used for 50 years to help the U.S. Navy echolocate mines. That project is going away in 2017 (to be replaced by robots) but in the meantime, a team of Navy dolphins have picked up something a little more vintage.

Off the coast of California, the dolphins, getting Navy training, uncovered what you see here: a Howell torpedo. From 1870 to 1889, a Rhode Island company produced a mere 50 of them, and it's only the second that's known to still exist (the other example is in a Keyport, Washington museum).

It might not look like much now, but back in the day, this was a top-shelf torpedo: the 11-foot, brass Howell could shoot 400 yards at 25 knots and was the first torpedo that could follow a track without leaving a wake, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Next step: get these dolphins to search for sunken pirate gold.

[Los Angeles Times]

Marissa Mayer, the new-ish CEO of Yahoo, announced this morning (though the purchase had been approved by Yahoo's board a few days earlier) that Yahoo will purchase Tumblr, the image-centric blogging and social network beloved by, mostly, teens. Her post was illustrated with a GIF, and posted on Tumblr. David Karp, the very young CEO of Tumblr, announced the acquisition on the staff Tumblr, ending with the salutation "Fuck yeah," because he is very young.

Yahoo has had a bad decade; the service was dominant in the early years of the internet with their "front page," a list of news and weather and updates that would routinely be set as a user's homepage. That led to other successes in search and email, but as Google became dominant in both those categories and the "front page" began to fall out of favor, Yahoo became a company with an aging and apathetic userbase. So they began acquiring other companies.

These have all turned out poorly. For an in-depth account, check out Mat Honan's piece for Gizmodo about the acquisition and destruction of Flickr, but that's just one of many. Geocities, del.icio.us, and so many more have also been nabbed by Yahoo.

Mayer, though, is a founding member of the early Google team, and was brought on to revitalize the brand. This is her first major acquisition, and man, is it a major one.

Tumblr is a blogging platform, but a closed system, unlike, say, Wordpress. Blogs are customizable, but only to a point, and the format encourages images and videos (and, especially, GIFs) rather than long wordy posts. More importantly, it's a massive social network, with 300 million unique visitors a month, commenting and sharing posts and joining and contributing to lots of little communities within Tumblr.

It's largely used by the youngs, with its largest demographic in the 18-24-year-old range. And it's a haven for the weirdest elements of internet culture, teen and otherwise--there's porn, there's objectionable content, and there's an awful lot of copyright infringement, all of which are things Yahoo has typically not tolerated. (Here is one extraordinarily NSFW example. DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK.)

The concern is that Yahoo will, as they've done before, stomp out the personality of Tumblr, inject advertising, alienate the users, and kill the community. (Tumblr, it's worth noting, has neither made nor seemed interested in ever making a profit.) Mayer seems determined not to follow this route, at least from her post, but Tumblr users are upset anyway. Wordpress noted that tens of thousands of Tumblr users had exported their Tumblrs to Wordpress after the announcement.

Previously blind patients who receive the recently FDA-approved Argus II bionic eye system will regain some degree of functional sight. The retinal implant technology, developed and distributed by Second Sight, can improve quality of life for patients who have lost functional vision due to retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes retinal cells to die. But the implant doesn't facilitate a sudden recovery of 20/20 vision.

Just as cochlear implants don't have the sensitivity to accurately relay the complex mix of frequencies in music, bionic vision through the Argus II will be closer to a very grainy black-and-white film than an HD movie.

The multi-piece system starts with a digital camera mounted in eyeglasses. Images from the camera get translated into data through a miniature computer and sent via wireless transmitter to a computer chip on the side of the eyeball. From there, the chip activates an eyelash-thin electrode array implanted behind the retina, which then stimulates retinal cells to send visual information to the brain.

Bionic vision will be closer to a very grainy black-and-white film than an HD movie.While the prosthesis sounds complex, it doesn't compare to the intricacy of the natural human eye. Shawn Kelly, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is currently working on his own retina implant system that includes the same basic technology as the Argus II. He explains that, with the technology available now, the electrode array isn't finely tuned enough to produce the same detail and clarity of a fully functional human retina.

"It's not going to be anything like normal vision," Kelly says, describing the expected results of his implant. "It's going to be very difficult to convey colors, and it's going to be difficult to convey the type of visual resolution that we have in the center of our vision."

The eye's retinal cells, commonly known as rods and cones, are split up into six types of receptors that detect contrast between light and dark, red and green, and blue and yellow. Electrical signals from the retinal cells travel through the optic nerve to the brain to form a complete picture of what the eye is looking at.

Instead of trying to imitate the activity of all six receptor types, Second Sight's Argus II implant focuses on stimulating retinal cells to show light and dark contrast. For a blind patient using an artificial retina, being able to detect the relative darkness of a hole or an approaching wall is a lot more important to independently navigating than knowing whether that wall is painted red or blue.

Brian Mech, vice president of business development at Second Sight, reports that in clinical trials, all of the company's 30 patients had some degree of vision improvement after receiving the retinal implant. "Basically they see black and white, shades of gray and they're getting somewhere between 50 and 60 pixels of information on average," Mech says.

In terms of acuity, the patient with the best result went from no useful sight to 20/1260 vision. This ratio means that to get the same amount of information a healthy human eye can discern from 1,260 feet, this patient would need to be standing 20 feet away.

Mech admits this level of acuity is limited. "[It] is still pretty poor considering normal vision is 20/20, but it's pretty amazing when you're completely blind to begin with," he says. But he explains that as research and testing continues, there is plenty of room to improve the system's performance just by working on the external technology. Even color vision is a possibility with improvements to the video processor and wireless transmitter. "I don't want to make it sound too easy," Mech says. "There's a lot of work to be done before we can do color vision, but the good news is that they won't need a new implant for it."

Second Sight is currently developing more advanced retinal implants, but the timeline is still unclear. Mech says it will be five to seven years or more before the next generation of implants becomes a reality.

This story was produced in partnership with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. For more FYIs, go here.

It looks like the IceCube Observatory neutrino detector at the South Pole has found what it was looking for just two years after opening.

Neutrinos are strange subatomic particles that travel through the galaxy in straight lines, harmlessly passing through regular matter, and with their neutral charge they are free of the influence of magnetic fields. As such, neutrinos convey a lot more information than their diminutive stature suggests, leading astronomers back to their origins in high-energy cosmic events, like gamma-ray bursts, supernovas, black holes, or star formation. (There are other, less-interesting neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions, within the sun, or sometimes in manmade accelerators, but those carry less energy and are easy to distinguish from the high-energy, deep-space neutrinos.)

The IceCube Observatory is all about finding these extraterrestrial neutrinos. To do that, it takes advantage of one of the few things neutrinos collide with: ice. Antarctica has that in abundance; the next trick is catching those collisions. The observatory consists of over 5,000 optical sensors arrayed in strings throughout holes drilled into the ice, sometimes as far as a kilometer deep. These sensors can catch and record the flashes of light produced when a neutrino collides with ice. With the sensors in place, scientists sat back and waited for results in trickle in.

At an astrophysics symposium on Wednesday, University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral fellow Nathan Whitehorn described 28 high-energy neutrino events observed by the Antarctic laboratory. Two of these events revealed neutrinos traveling faster than any ever observed in a manmade accelerator. A forthcoming publication is set to describe the events in more detail. For now, we just know the observatory is functioning, and scientists are ready to work with the data it generates.

[Phys.org]

The New York Times has a fascinating documentary on the crack cocaine epidemic that gripped the United States in the 1980s. The short of it: The "crack baby" scare that threatened to spawn a generation of damaged children never materialized.

For those of you who may not recall, the mid-1980s were rife with hysteria surrounding cocaine--in particular crack cocaine--and the huge social toll it was taking on the U.S. New and little-understood, crack was associated with all kinds of social ills, including rising crime rates, poverty, and (far more nebulously) the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis. But for a moment, the "crack baby" alarm sounded the loudest--the country and its social system was about to be completely overwhelmed with a generation of babies who, due to prenatal exposure to crack cocaine, would be born with all kinds of mental deficiencies and health problems.

That generation of "crack babies" never emerged. Crack, which was described by some medical doctors as being as devastating to an unborn fetus as heroin, turned out to be less damaging than alcohol (which is far more widely used and carries greater risks for long-term fetal damage). The symptoms early research associated with "crack babies" turned out to be the same as the symptoms for any prematurely born baby.

How did science get it so wrong? The primary study behind the "crack baby" epidemic scare involved just 23 infants--a sample set too small to be meaningful. It also included only infants rather than adults who had been exposed to crack as infants. Later studies conducted on adults who had been prenatally exposed to crack often showed very small changes in their brains rather than the sweeping deficiencies predicted by the science of the time. It's a lesson in what happens when a misreading of the data leads to a publicly accepted narrative, especially one that feeds on society's collective fears about the future. Click through below to watch the mini-doc.

[NYT]

Good news, guys! Candy isn't going to make you fat or kill you or anything negative at all! Feast on M&M's like an 8-year-old on Halloween, because you're totally good on this one.

Says a study funded by the National Confectioners Association, a trade group representing the candy, chocolate, and gum industry.

Some findings from the study:

1.) "Frequency of candy consumption was not associated with the risk of obesity, overweight/obesity, elevated waist circumference, elevated skinfold thickness, blood pressure, low density lipoprotein (LDL) or high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, triglycerides, or insulin resistance."

2.) "Increased frequency of candy consumption among adults in the United States was not associated with objective measures of adiposity or select cardiovascular risk factors, despite associated dietary differences."

So in addition to "[fostering] industry growth by advancing the interests of the confectionery industry and its customers," the NCA apparently funds (sketchy) scientific studies about how it's cool to eat as much candy as you want, you guys, no problem, just live off the stuff. (Who runs this Association? I, personally, picture Candyland characters in suits sitting behind desks, barely visible through shadow and cigar smoke. But use your imagination!)

Well, some other studies would seem to disagree with the study's assessment. But who are you going to believe? The New England Journal of Medicine or Laura Shumow, MHS, Director of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs, National Confectioners Association, who said in a press release: "There is a place for little pleasures, such as candy, in life. A little treat in moderation can have a positive impact on mood and satisfaction, and as emerging research suggests, minimal impact on diet and health risk."

Oh, God, Big Candy, we want to believe!

Yahoo! is a carnivorous plant whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid, known as a pitfall trap.

Startups, such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Del.icio.us, are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments and nectar bribes. Yahoo!'s rim (peristome) is slippery, when moistened by condensation or nectar, causing startups to fall into the trap. Yahoo! may also contain waxy scales, protruding aldehyde crystals, cuticular folds, downward pointing hairs, or guard-cell-originating lunate cells on the inside of the pitcher to ensure that startups cannot climb out.

The small bodies of liquid contained within the pitcher traps are called phytotelmata. They drown the startup, and it is gradually dissolved. This may occur by bacterial action (the bacteria being washed into the pitcher by rainfall) or by enzymes secreted by Yahoo! itself. Yahoo! may also contain mutualistic insect larvae, which feed on trapped startups, and whose excreta Yahoo! then absorbs.

Whatever the mechanism of digestion, startups are converted into a solution of amino acids, peptides, phosphates, ammonium and urea, from which Yahoo! obtains its mineral nutrition (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Like all carnivorous plants, Yahoo! exists in locations where the soil is too poor in minerals and/or too acidic for most companies to survive.

Description of Yahoo! is slightly altered from this Wikipedia entry. Idea inspired by Rusty Foster.

The Navy's unmanned and autonomous X-47B continues to hit new milestones. Less than a week after completing its first catapult launch from a carrier deck last Tuesday the Unmanned Combat Aerials System (UCAS) executed its first touch and go landings--that's when an aircraft touches down like it's landing but then accelerates and takes off again--aboard the USS George H.W. Bush on Friday, bringing this technology demonstrator ever closer to being fully carrier-capable.

The X-47B is the Navy's first modern unmanned fixed-wing aircraft to operate from a carrier deck and is currently proving out a suite of technologies that will enable a future program (known as Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike system, or UCLASS) to produce an actual unmanned, autonomous combat jet for Navy service. Critical to UCLASS are the precision GPS and relative navigation technologies aboard both aircraft and carrier that link the two together into a seamless system, and that's what we're seeing at work in the video below.

In the video, the X-47B makes two passes over the carrier deck before executing a couple of touch and go maneuvers, which are essentially aborted landings wherein an aircraft touches down on the carrier deck and takes off again. They are a typical training maneuver, used when a pilot is practicing landing approaches. In carrier ops touch and go maneuvers are quite a bit more significant, as pilots must quickly take off again if they miss the arresting cable on the carrier deck when landing (although technically this is called a "bolter" rather than a "touch and go).

The two initial flyovers aren't just for show, however, and that's perhaps the most interesting part of the this video. During the two approaches wherein the X-47B doesn't touch down it is basically practicing its landing approach plus a "wave off" in which either the Landing Signal Officer on the flight deck or the aircraft itself decides the landing is unsafe. This could be because something on the flight deck becomes unsafe (a person or vehicle wanders into the landing area, for instance) or because the X-47B's flight computers detect something amiss with the aircraft's glide path or angle of approach.

In other words, those first two flyovers are testing the ability of the carrier and aircraft to talk to each other over the super-fast datalink that they share--which is really the linchpin of this system. And the touch and go moments show the system working spectacularly, putting the X-47B on the deck and then sending it skyward again off the other end. The Navy is still certifying the X-47Bs tail hook and landing capability on a terrestrial carrier simulator at nearby Naval Air Station Patuxent River on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay (the USS George H.W. Bush is tooling around at some undisclosed set of coordinates off the Virginia/Maryland coast so the aircraft can fly between the two), but by the looks of things it shouldn't have any problem completing carrier landings--and its mission--once it is cleared to do so.

[U.S. Navy]

In an anonymous survey taken by scientists at a prestigious cancer center, more than half of the respondents said they'd failed to reproduce published scientific findings at least one time.

Any one study may come to an interesting conclusion-"this chemical causes cancer" or "this drug works" or "penis size matters"-but the way scientists check if those studies are true is by doing them over again. When study after study gets the same results, you can be reasonably sure the conclusion is true. On the other hand, large numbers of irreproducible studies in the scientific literature indicate that something's wrong, reported Retraction Watch, a watchdog blog that first pointed us to the new survey.

The researchers involved in the irreproducible studies didn't always seem eager to make things right. Sixty-two percent of the survey respondents who tried to contact the original researchers found the study authors responded negatively, indifferently or not at all. Only one in three researchers in the survey, which a team of MD Anderson Cancer Center physicians sent to all scientists at the center, ever resolved the discrepancy they found.

The survey's lead author, Leonard Zwelling, told Retraction Watch he blamed academics for not policing each other adequately. His survey also found that many junior scientists felt pressured to prove senior scientists' hypotheses correct, even if they couldn't find the supporting data.

You do expect that once in a while, scientific studies will come to incorrect conclusions just by chance. And you've probably seen in many media reports on studies done in rats or a small number of people that say something about how far such studies are from clinical trials in humans. This is interesting, but don't get too attached, is the message.

So what's the problem? Those who run clinical trials themselves don't have the luxury of ignoring studies done in animals or just a few dozen people, Zwelling and his colleagues argued in their own paper, published in the journal PLOS ONE. That's all they have to help them choose what to test in major human clinical trials. Irreproducible studies performed all the way down the line, from the most basic experiments in Petri dishes to later animal studies, may be a major reason so many clinical trials fail. The failures waste time and money and slow the development of working therapies.

[Retraction Watch]

We've heard a lot from the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) community about the potential for drones to assist in oil and gas exploration, yet we've seen relatively little by way of example as companies across the world wait for aviation law to catch up with the technological reality. Not so in Norway, where a team from the Center for Integrated Petroleum Research (a joint project between the University of Bergen and Bergen-based Uni Research) is using UAS to look for oil reserves on land at at sea.

Members of the center's Virtual Outcrop Geology group are employing an octo-copter loaded with all kinds of sensors-high-definition cameras, infrared sensors, LIDAR scanners, etc.-to map the geography and geology of the Norwegian landscape from above. The group used to do this by sending teams out into the wilderness with ground-based laser scanners and other equipment to create digital maps of the terrain from the ground. But given Norway's diverse geography, such ground mapping was often impossible, which forced the team to lease helicopters to capture what they couldn't get themselves, often at very high cost.

The new drones can perform the same aerial mapping tasks as helicopters, quickly reaching high elevations and other inaccessible areas to generate 3-D terrain maps that can be integrated with data from geological and seismological studies to produce three-dimensional pictures of the Earth's crust. These in turn can tell geologists a lot about where oil is likely to be hiding both on land and underneath the surrounding seabed.

And of course the drones can do all of this at a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional methods-which is one of the most promising aspects of UAS technology regardless of application. By putting the means to conduct aerial survey in the hands of individual users at a relatively reasonable cost, everything from wildlife management to geological survey to infrastructure maintenance has the potential to become more precise, more effective, and ultimately less expensive. Virtual Outcrop Geology's work is a case in point-even if cheaper oil and gas exploration methods aren't going to translate into savings at the gas pump any time soon.

[University of Bergen]

If you moved away from a place soon after starting kindergarten and never went back-how much would you remember about the town? Just a corner of a distinctive building, perhaps, or a stand of trees under which you liked to play.

Luo Gang, who grew up in the Fujian Province in China, remembered only that his hometown had two bridges. He was abducted one day on his way to kindergarten and taken to a family nearly 1,000 miles away. His new family treated him as their own, but he still reviewed his old memories every night before going to bed, he told the South China Morning Post.

When he became an adult, he joined a Chinese website dedicated to locating missing children and submitted a rough sketch of what he remembered about home. Information from the volunteers, plus satellite images from Google Maps, helped him find his actual hometown, Guangan in the Sichuan Province, the South China Morning Post reported from Nhaidu, a Fujian news website.

The Internet is now awash in warm fuzzies from his story. Luo eventually reunited with his biological parents, who had worried about terrible things like whether he was well clothed and fed.

Luo's story echoes that of Saroo Munshi Khan, who fell asleep on a train when he was five and was borne away from his hometown, whose name he didn't know. A nonprofit group eventually found him and put up a notice for him as a missing child. When no one responded, the group, the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, adopted him to an Australian couple.

Khan grew up in Australia. But after college, he began looking for his hometown on Google Maps, searching for landmarks a five-year-old kid would know. Like Luo, he eventually found and met his birth family.

[South China Morning Post]

Tomorrow, Microsoft will announce its long-awaited next-gen Xbox. The rumor mill has been churning for months--years, even--and reports with varying credibility have appeared. Here's what to expect.

A NEW NAME

This is surprisingly up in the air. Unlike the PlayStation 4, which we could at least guess at because of consistent branding until that point, the new Xbox has had a couple names thrown around. At Microsoft, internally, it's been called "Durango," (that's almost certainly just a code name; Microsoft always uses code names for products, which very very rarely ever leave the Microsoft campus) but the leading candidate after a report from the International Business Times UK, crediting unnamed sources, is Xbox Infinity. That's possible. Also thrown around: "Loop," and Xbox 720 (boring).

ALWAYS-ON (POSSIBLY)

Another rumor that's been bouncing around as of late (maybe more than "as of late" at this point): you'll need an internet connection to use the Xbox. As in, if you don't have a way to get on the web, you won't have any use for the new Xbox. Microsoft might use that constraint to seamlessly integrate software updates, but it could be bad news for anyone with a spotty internet connection, or even just an outage. Reasonable or not, the idea was met with ire from most of the gaming community.

Now others are reporting on a leaked memo that apparently stomps on this rumor. Microsoft might've walked the idea back after the negative reaction to a (correct) leak, or they might never have been planning to have a mandatory connection in the first place. Or, heck, it might still be what happens. A connection might also be required for some functions, while not for gaming. Tough to tell at this point.

CHANGES TO THE KINECT

What will likely be mandatory for the new Xbox is Kinect, Microsoft's motion-tracking camera that first came with the Xbox 360. (The leaks seem to be pretty consistent on that front.) It might even be necessary to set up and adjust the camera for the Xbox to start. There's probably been a few adjustments to the Kinect, but it's tough to say exactly what those adjustments might look like. Motion tracking for up to six players, perhaps? Or an increased resolution?

NEW SPECS

Obviously, the games will look prettier. How much prettier? Well, you can check out the spec breakdown here, if you're into that kind of thing. It's been compared to what we saw in the PS4, and we'd venture to guess the PS4 vs. Xbox war won't be won on graphics alone.

Meanwhile, the new Xbox will reportedly include a Blu-ray player. (About time; Microsoft has fought off including a Blu-ray drive for two generations now.) There's also word of it having an HDMI-in port, which would lead to the conclusion that Microsoft is trying to make a console more integrated into your TV: the port could directly connect to your cable box, letting the Xbox overlay information while you're channel surfing. Microsoft has always been more non-gaming-focused than Sony; the Xbox is a stellar entertainment device, as good as any Roku or Apple TV, in addition to a console. So will the next Xbox be the Living Room Console to Sony's Hardcore Gaming Console? Possibly!

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

Pricing is still a little up in the air. An estimate of $500 or $300 with an online subscription has been ballparked, and that's probably as good a guess as any at this point. (It's very possible they won't mention pricing at all during the event, though.) What does seem probable is that it'll be out this holiday season. It's hard to imagine that Microsoft would plan an announcement this close to Sony's announcement and not compete with them in November or December.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

We may or may not see what the new Xbox looks like at the event: if they did show us, it'd be the perfect opportunity way one-up their rivals after everyone (including us) balked at not seeing the PS4 at Sony's event. But right now, the truth is we don't know all that much about what this console looks like. The gaming blog Kotaku had some leaked info about the controllers: apparently they're almost the same as the current crop of controllers, although those won't work on the new system. Expect minor tweaks there and hope we get a gander at the actual console-box tomorrow.