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Today in Great Reads: "The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks" at The Atavist

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The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks The Atavist

The Atavist, one of our favorite venues for long-form journalism (and a great example of what the future of the medium looks like--their iPad stories have videos, photos, timelines, references, and more, all elegantly presented), just announced their latest story: "The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks", by Joe Kloc. It's the story of Joseph Gutheinz, a rogue NASA investigator, who's dedicated his life to retrieving lost or stolen moon rocks. It's available for $2.99 (Atavist app or iBooks) or $1.99 (Kindle, Nook, text). Now if you'll excuse us, we have some reading work to do.


Scan Your Food For Bacteria With Your Cell Phone

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E. Coli Scanner The device attaches to a cell phone camera. UCLA

Have you ever been tempted to order steak tartare but decided against it for fear of getting sick? This little cell phone scanner can take a look at it for you and let you know if it does in fact harbor any E. coli bacteria.

It attaches to a typical cell phone camera and uses fluorescence imaging to detect the bacteria. Engineers at UCLA combined quantum dots, a type of tiny semiconductor, with capillaries containing antibodies. When the capillaries contain an E. coli sample, they emit light.

The cell phone attachment thereby works like a fluorescent microscope, illuminating the presence of the nasty bacteria. It's another example of how cell phones can serve as a platform for a multitude of other sensors - CellScope, a previous PopSci Best of What's New winner, takes microscope images and can send them to distant labs for analysis.

It's not clear whether this UCLA scanner will ever reach the market, but it shows the potential of a portable, cheap detector for one of the worst food and water contaminants out there.

Hot Weather Makes Mammals Smaller, So Will Global Warming Make Us Shrink?

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Horses Big and Small This illustration shows the ancient horse ancestor Sifrhippus sandrae (right) touching noses with a modern Morgan horse, the latter which stands about 5 feet high at the shoulders and weighs 1,000 lbs. Sifrhippus, by contrast, was the size of a small house cat (about 8.5 lbs.) at the beginning of the Eocene (~55.8 million years ago). It is the earliest known horse. [Illustration by Danielle Byerley, Florida Museum of Natural History

Back in the day of the first mammals, horses started out the size of house cats, weighing about 8 pounds and standing only a few inches tall. Then they got even littler, a direct result of the warm temperatures that characterized the Eocene era. Only when Earth cooled down a bit did the beasts get big, according to a new study - the first evidence that temperature directly affects body size. Interesting results when you think about rising global temperatures. Are Earth's animals about to undergo a New Shrinkening?

In about three-quarters of mammals, a truism called Bergmann's rule holds that animals are smaller in hot climates and bigger in cold climates. Think about wooly mammoths versus Madagascan tenrecs. But a debate persists about why this is so, and whether it's because of temperature itself or because of indirect results, like food abundance and conservation of heat energy. Ross Secord and colleagues set out to answer this question by studying horses from now and in the past.

About 56 million years ago, the Earth warmed up during a phase known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. Carbon dioxide increased and global average temperatures rose by about 5 to 10 degrees Celsius. At least in horses, body sizes went down as temperature went up.

The little horse in the picture above is called Sifrhippus sandrae, and he is the earliest known horse. The species probably came to North America and Europe from a high-latitude land bridge that opened during the warming phase. After its arrival, its body size shrank by 30 percent over the next 130,000 years, Secord and colleagues say.

They considered the dryness of environments, atmospheric pressure and even the nutritional content of plants exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide, and ultimately conclude that temperature was the primary driver of size evolution in Sifrhippus. Their paper appears today in Science.

So does this mean that global warming will make us all smaller? Taken to its furthest extent, this hypothesis sounds like some sort of Malthusian dream. Smaller humans would likely require less food. That means we would require less land on which to grow the food. Then we would use less fertilizer, and we'd need fewer factories to make fewer tractors to plow the fields on which we harvest the smaller amounts of food. Fewer factories=less energy requirements=fewer carbon dioxide emissions=less global warming?

Sound crazy? Maybe, but I'm not the first person to say this. Philip Gingerich, a researcher at the University of Michigan who first noticed decreasing body size during the PETM, said he jokes about this all the time.

"We're going to be walking around 3 feet tall if we keep going the way we're going," he said. "Maybe that's not all bad and if that's the worst it gets, it will be fine. You can either adapt, or you go extinct, or you can move, and there's not a lot of place to move anymore, so I think it's a matter of adaptation and becoming smaller."

Like NASA's new cloud-cooling study, this vision of the future is an almost poetic example of nature taking its course in spite of us. Things really do want to even out in the end.

It's Official: DiscoRobo Wins PopSci's Ultimate Robot Dance-Off

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Victorious DiscoRobo End-zone dance! Dan Bracaglia
This is about as close as DiscoRobo can get to raising his arms in victory

Thousands of votes were cast in our first robot dance-off, but the winner was clear early on. Tosy's DiscoRobo earned a dominating 78 percent of the tally. Mattel's Fijit friend earned 13 percent of the electorate for personality, and MyKeepon took home the remaining 9 percent -- likely based on cuteness alone, since as basically two-thirds of a rubber yellow snowman, MyKeepon is not the most agile of dancers. Check out the full results breakdown and re-watch the video after the break.

The Results:


Video by Dan Bracaglia

Video: Wireless Devices Swim Through Your Bloodstream and Fix You Up, 'Fantastic Voyage' Style

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Fantastic Voyage A wireless medical device can move through the bloodstream controlled by a magnetic field. Carlos Suarez, StrongBox3d
Deliver drugs, run tests and remove blood clots

Implantable medical devices will eventually dispense drugs, get rid of blood clots and perform micro-surgeries inside our bodies, but powering them could be problematic. If the point is to have minimally invasive gadgets keeping tabs on our health, cutting patients open to swap out their batteries is not an ideal situation.

A new micro device solves that problem elegantly, while upending some assumptions about how our bodies work. It's powered by induction, which thanks to some new calculations has been shown to work much better in our bodies than anyone thought. All you need is an external radio transmitter to keep it humming.

Stanford engineering professor Ada Poon demonstrated a new wireless device at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week. It can travel in the bloodstream, propelling itself through blood vessels and performing an array of tasks. A radio transmitter outside the body sends a signal to a magnetically coupled antenna, and any change in the transmitter's current induces a voltage in the antenna.

In previous research, engineers have assumed device antennas would have to be fairly large to work inside the body and receive a signal through all that tissue and fluid and fat. But it turns out this assumption was wrong, as a Stanford news release explains it.

Poon rethought some calculations, and instead of considering bone and muscle as electrical conductors, she thought of them as a dielectric, a type of insulator. Her calculations showed that while human tissue is a poor conductor, radio waves travel through them 100 times farther than originally thought. So this means antennae could be 100 times smaller than everyone thought, and still be just as powerful. The antenna on the device Poon demonstrated at the conference is just two millimeters square.

She already developed two prototypes, which both create their own propulsion by driving an electrical current through bodily fluid. It may be some time before patients swallow antenna-pills for diagnostic testing, but when they do, they may look a lot like this.

[Stanford Engineering via IEEE Spectrum]

5-Minute Project: Hand Warmers

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Hand Warmers 1 Greg Maxson
Make your own portable hot packs

Instant hand warmers are great--just shake 'em up, and you've got spontaneous warmth to thaw your hands during the cold winter months. But they're awfully expensive, and not because they're complicated to manufacture. In fact, you can make them yourself in a few very easy steps.

1. Fill a large ziplock bag one quarter of the way full with calcium chloride ice-melt pellets (available at most hardware stores).

2. Fill a smaller ziplock bag halfway with water, close tight, and place inside the first bag.

3. Squeeze the smaller bag until it breaks open, to create a heat-producing reaction between 20 minutes and an hour.

Originally posted by Justin DiPlacido on Instructables.

There Are Way More Blood Types Than You Think

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Bryan Ballif, University of Vermont Bryan Ballif, a University of Vermont biologist, in front of his mass spectrometer. Joshua Brown, University of Vermont, 2012

Researchers at the University of Vermont have discovered two new proteins on red blood cells that confirm the testable existence of two new blood types. It's an important discovery, one that'll greatly reduce the risk of incompatible blood transfusions among tens of thousands of people. But what we were more struck by in this press release was the fact that these two new blood types--named Junior and Langereis--bring the total number of recognized blood types up to 32. 32!

Turns out there's much more than just A, B, AB, and O: there are now 28 other, rarer types, often named after the person in whom they were discovered. These rarer types are identified by the presence of a particular group of antigens (substances that tell your immune system to send out antibodies), and many, like the Kell and MNS blood types, can actually be concurrent with more common blood types like A or O.

But the discovery of new blood types is pretty rare; the last new one was discovered more than a decade ago. So it's big news that two were discovered at the same time. The Junior and Langereis groups are particularly prevalent in East Asia, especially Japan. Says University of Vermont biologist Bryan Ballif: "More than 50,000 Japanese are thought to be Junior negative and may encounter blood transfusion problems or mother-fetus incompatibility."

The study appears in the February issue of Nature Genetics.

The Six Places on Earth That Most Resemble Other Planets

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The Simulated Red Planet Haughton-Mars Project 2005
Space researchers uses deserts, valleys, and freezing lakes to test equipment and simulate procedures on space missions. Here's where they put future exploration to the test - without leaving our planet

To get into space, we have to practice at home. That's the idea behind NASA's Earth Analogs program, which tests people, ideas and technology at a variety of inhospitable places around the world. Finding places on Earth with physical similarities to space sites isn't easy - but the space agency has located desert, volcanic, arctic, lake and ocean locations for testing all manner of things.


Kickstarter Is On Track to Out-Fund the National Endowment for the Arts

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Kickstarter, Haulin' It In Kickstarter

Yancey Strickler, a co-founder of Kickstarter, said today that the crowd-sourced funding machine is on track to distribute over $150 million in 2012--more than the National Endowment for the Arts, which has a 2012 operating budget of $146 million. That's incredibly impressive for Kickstarter, which has been on a roll lately, what with sending 31 Kickstarter-funded films to SXSW and breaking records with the new Double Fine Productions adventure game.

It also goes to show just how underfunded the NEA really is. As a comparison, the Canada Council for the Arts, the roughly equivalent organization up north, has a budget of around $181 million USD--supporting a population a tenth the size. But it's not a one-to-one comparison. Kickstarter funds all kinds of things the NEA doesn't, especially consumer items like the big-money-earning iPod Nano watch kit and this iPhone dock. Kickstarter has very little overhead cost compared to the running of a government agency, and (so far, at least) doesn't have to fight off congressional attacks every few years. And the NEA has very different responsibilities in terms of what it does and does not fund; Kickstarter, for example, is under no obligation to fund traditional or folk artists, and the NEA is unlikely to even attempt to fund your college roommate's documentary about the wild raccoons of Jackson, Mississippi. So it's not entirely fair to plant them side-by-side and shake a finger.

Still, it's great news for Kickstarter, and for us as well--it can only be a good thing to have an influential, democratic system to fund the creative projects that can't get funding through the NEA, or the major publishers of games, movies, and music.

[via Talking Points Memo]

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Yancey Strickler's name.

New Tubes: Redesigning the Toilet to Produce Water, Fertilizer, and Energy

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New Toilet Lana Birbrair

About 2.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to a sanitary toilet. To fix this, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded eight grants last year to scientists and engineers to invent a toilet that could function without piped water, a sewer system or outside electricity-and would cost less than 5 cents a day to operate. With the funding, scientists are working on using processes such as evaporation, combustion, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion to break down waste in toilets into three essential resources: water, fertilizer and fuel. Click here to see how it works.

Galaxy May Be Full of Wandering Hobo Planets (Planet-Sized Bindles Unconfirmed)

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Nomad Planet Not pictured: Bindle, dirty vest, boxcar. Greg Stewart / SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Over at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), which is associated with Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a new study indicates that not only are there many so-called "nomad planets" in our galaxy, but that there may be tens of thousands of them, drifting through the Milky Way unattached to a star or your buttoned-up corporate way of life.

Nomad planets have only been confirmed in the last year or so, mostly by monitoring nearby stars to see if and when their light is "refocused" by a large passing object, like a planet. This new study is more math-based; it relies on the known gravitational pull of the entire galaxy, and how that might divide up into objects ranging in size from Pluto-sized rocks to Jupiter-sized giants. The research suggests that there may be as many as 100,000 more nomad planets than there are stars in the galaxy.

The research has some pretty interesting implications; our understanding of interstellar object behavior doesn't really include unattached planets, and the search for extraterrestrial life could be the first field to really see a change from the survey. Nomad planets don't have the light and warmth from a star to nurture life, but they actually might not even need it: with a thick atmosphere and a significantly radioactive core, they might theoretically be able to retain enough heat to serve as solo carriers of life through the galaxy.

[Stanford]

The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, February 20-24, 2012

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CHOMP. Beijing is the site of the 7th Annual International Strawberry Symposium, in a district called Changping that's apparently known for its strawberries. Here's the thing: none of us will ever be as happy as that adorable child about to do a no-hands chompdown on those strawberries. For more great news images (strawberry-related or otherwise), check out American Photo for a full roundup of this week's best photojournalism, Lintao Jhang/Getty Images

It's rainy/snowy/gross outside the PopSci headquarters in New York. But through the grey gloom, one little boy has given us the will to make it through the week. We call him Chomp Boy. Chomp away, Chomp Boy. You enjoy that berry. Enjoy it for all of us. As tribute, we've given him the prime spot in a particularly excellent roundup of the week's most amazing images--exploding stars, x-rayed eels, and rockets screaming through the northern lights are all to come.


Click to launch our roundup of the best images of the week.

This Week in the Future, February 20-24, 2012

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This Week in the Future, February 20-24, 2012 Baarbarian

Ah, a nice bucolic, all-American farm scene. Pigs with augmented-reality glasses browse a plate of fast food with prehistoric housecat-sized horses. A farmer shoots a drone. Dear all other countries: this is what it's really like here.

Want to win this patriotic 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:

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

Smithsonian Is 3-D Scanning and Printing Part of Museum Collection

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How Could We Possibly Choose? The Milestones of Flight exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum contains plenty of awesome things, any of which would be excellent candidates for 3-D printed replicas. Photo by Eric Long, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Please give me a Friendship 7 to call my own

The Smithsonian Institution, guardian of the nation's historical awesomeness, is building a new archive of 3-D digital models for key pieces in its collection. It starts with a statue of Thomas Jefferson and ends, we sincerely hope, with full-scale replicas of every item in the National Air and Space Museum, which we can personally print out with a souped-up Makerbot.

CNET reports that that some 3-D scanned items will become 3-D printouts, and others will remain digital models (which could also conceivably be printed, or used to help restoration efforts). Replicas would probably go to schools or other museums, but it would be fairly simple to put the plans online somewhere and let people hook up their own laser sintering devices.

A Smithsonian spokeswoman said this is not in their current plans, but hey, one can dream.

This would be amazing - instead of tinkering over hobby-store models, you could just print your own Spirit of St. Louis. Or the Apollo 11 command capsule. Or SpaceShipOne. What if you could print every single item in the collection and put it in your garage?

I personally choose the Wright Flyer, Friendship 7, Apollo 11 command module, and a Mars rover. (I already have a mini Spirit of St. Louis, so that's accounted for.) If you could 3-D print awesome aerospace replicas, which would you choose? (There are lots of other items related to our nation's history that are not aerospace, too.)

Already, you can check out several pieces from the museum's Human Origins exhibit, featuring early hominid and primate fossils. The virtual objects on display here were either CT or laser scanned, according to the museum.

Smithsonian curators also scanned and 3-D printed a statue of our nation's third president. It's a replica of a Jefferson statue installed at Monticello, and it was apparently installed as part of a preview exhibit for the just-groundbroken National Museum of African American History and Culture. CNET has the scoop on how curators used a $100,000 Minolta laser scanner and worked with Studio EIS to generate a 3-D model, and studio RedEye on Demand to generate a 3-D printout. Head over to CNET for more details and a photo gallery.


And tell us what piece of our nation's history you would print out, given the chance.

The Department of Homeland Security's Favorite PopSci Posts

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DHS Is Watching Us
The DHS is monitoring publications and social media for red-alert keywords. Here's what they're reading on PopSci

The Department of Homeland Security is carefully watching the internet. They search through publications like this one (actually, specifically this one: we've been on the DHS watch-list for awhile), as well as all of our public social media lives, for possible "Items of Interest," which they find by searching for a whole bunch of sometimes-ridiculous keywords. (Animal New York rounded up a bunch of them.) It got us wondering: We write about a lot of security and military stuff here at PopSci. What's the DHS reading on our site?

We filtered out our traffic to hits originating from DHS.gov, and found that, yes, the Department of Homeland Security reads PopSci. (Hi!) They're not supplying huge traffic--barely over 50,000 hits in total--but it's definitely enough to monitor, and we can see pretty clear spikes and valleys coming from them. The biggest spike was on July 11th, 2011, though the DHS doesn't seem to have been looking for anything in particular that day. And there was a significant drop-off in terrorism monitoring right before Labor Day, which we attribute to ideal golf conditions. Anyway, here are five of their most read articles.

1. Citizens in Flood Zone Build Homemade Levees to Protect Their Homes

Published: May 19, 2011
DHS Hits: 762
The Department of Homeland Security is particularly touchy about discussion of disasters, natural or otherwise, as well as emergency assistance and preparedness. If we had included dangerous keywords like "Human to ANIMAL" or "AMTRAK" in this story, we wouldn't be here writing this. We'd be in a prison in a country you've never even heard of.

2. Toy Fair 2011: The Best Kids' Toys for Adults

Published: February 15, 2011
DHS Hits: 431
The Department of Homeland Security is looking to deploy military toys to young children, including (water) guns, a tactical seafaring warship simulator (a new version of Battleship), an introduction to mind control, and a miniature autonomous tank.

3. 11 Ways Science and Technology Are Waging War on Winter

Published: January 27, 2011
DHS Hits: 363
The Department of Homeland Security does not appreciate our taking license with the phrase "waging war." They wage war. We write about snow-pooping robots.

4. FYI: Could Scientists Really Create a Zombie Apocalypse Virus?

Published: February 24, 2011
DHS Hits: 273
The Department of Homeland Security is relieved to find that we are not aware of any of their in-house zombie projects.

5. 2020 Vision: A Look Forward To The Promises of a Truly Amazing Year

Published: April 27, 2011
DHS Hits: 272
The Department of Homeland Security is casually interested in PopSci's time machine.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and Other Services

A search other governmental agencies turns up...mostly nothing. We did find out that the CIA searched more than 200 times to find an image of Khloe Kardashian, which we don't seem to have ever published (?), and that the FBI is probably hungry because their favorite PopSci articles are all about modernist cuisine. The NSA likes toys, and the DEA seems to not be interested in us at all, which, um, yes, good, nothing to see here.


The Virus Station: A Field Lab for Finding a Deadly Disease

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The Virus Station 01 WHO/Christopher Black
To catch a fast-acting virus, response teams have to be faster

A man who worked in a lead and gold mine in southwest Uganda died suddenly from a hemorrhagic fever. Concerned that it could be the beginning of an outbreak of Marburg virus, which is similar to Ebola, doctors sent a blood sample to the Uganda Virus Research Institute, where pathologists confirmed that Marburg was indeed the cause of death and alerted the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both the WHO and the CDC are tasked with containing the spread of virulent diseases. If scientists could locate the animal that transmitted the virus to the miner, they could stop an outbreak.

Two days later, in Atlanta, a team of eight scientists from the Viral Special Pathogens Branch of the CDC loaded respirators and Tyvek suits, liquid nitrogen tanks, folding tables, a generator and five gallons of Lysol into the belly of a 747. They flew to Entebbe, outside Kampala, Uganda's capital, and drove 200 miles to Ibanda village. Just outside the village, the group reached the mine, where they expected to find the animal host.

Bats, and their guano, were everywhere. The scientists donned their suits and respirators and entered, using nets to capture 800 bats before heading back to Ibanda, where the rest of the team had constructed a lab inside the village's hospital. Then they euthanized the bats.

The team went to work dissecting in an assembly line. One group collected tissue samples from the bats' kidneys, livers, lungs and hearts; another took blood samples; another entered data. They put the samples in tubes, put the tubes in women's stockings (which fit snugly around the samples), and dipped the packages into tanks of liquid nitrogen, where they were stored for transit. A scientist returned to Entebbe with the frozen tubes.

Within a week of the call, the samples reached Atlanta and the CDC's high-containment labs, where scientists hunted for signs of Marburg. "If we can know how a population with the disease acts, how it might impair them, we can get a jump on it," says Craig Manning, a member of the CDC team. With the samples, they could begin to understand how the disease manifested itself in one species and jumped to another.

They discovered that 23 of the 800 bats carried Marburg, although they couldn't find evidence of symptoms. Back in Uganda, the mine was shut down and the virus's only victim buried.

Check out more from our Future of Medicine issue here.

Does a Splash of Red Make a Woman More Attractive?

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Angelina in Red Lipstick Dan MacMedan/WireImage
And if so, why?

At the Oscars this year, Angelina Jolie paired a leggy black dress with bombshell hair. What stood out, though, was her bright red lipstick. I thought she looked great, and--according to science--most of the men watching agreed.

In 2008, psychologist Andrew Elliot at the University of Rochester and colleagues showed that men perceive women in red to be more attractive and sexually desirable than those wearing other colors. Two years later, Elliot documented that men sit closer to women in red and ask them more intimate questions. One thing Elliot hadn't answered--until now--is why a lady in red is so hard to resist.

In his new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Elliot posits that men see women in red as ready and willing, and that this sexual receptiveness is what makes them attractive and desirable.

The most obvious example of red as a sexual cue in nature is a familiar one. Increased blood flow during ovulation allows female baboons, chimps, rhesus monkeys and other non-human primates to display red coloration on their faces, genitals and hindquarters, signaling to males that they're fertile and ready to mate. While this is pretty convincing on its own, there's another example that hits closer to home: During human ovulation, hormonal shifts cause our skin-tone to lighten and blood flow to increase under the skin. Adam Pazda, the study's lead author and a graduate student in Elliot's lab, says these changes could make blushing more prevalent when women are most fertile, which could have predisposed men to interpret red as a sign of sexual readiness.

Red was used as early as 10,000 B.C.E. in lipstick and rouge to mimic the red blush of sexual interest and excitationTo test that red is a sign of sexual readiness in humans--and that it's that signal that makes women who wear red attractive--Elliot, Pazda and Tobias Greitemeyer, a psychologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, ran a series of experiments on straight and bisexual men who were told they were participating in a study on first impressions. In the first experiment, men who were shown a picture of a "moderately attractive" woman wearing a red shirt rated her as more interested in sex than the same woman wearing a white shirt (the shirt colors were altered in Photoshop).

A separate group of men were shown the white-shirt images and then asked to read one of two scenarios: one in which the woman was acting sexually receptive at a bar, and one where she wasn't. The men who were told the woman was interested in sex rated her as more attractive. (Both groups of men rated the woman as equally likeable, showing that sexual readiness specifically influences attraction, not just positive impressions.)

Finally, a third group of men were shown a picture of a different woman wearing either a red or a green shirt. Not surprisingly, the men found the women in red to be more attractive, sexually desirable and sexually receptive. But when the researchers looked at the effect of the shirt color and sexual receptiveness together on ratings of attractiveness and desirability, the shirt became less important and sexual readiness more.

As Pazda explains, "Perceived receptivity is doing all the work in affecting perceptions of attractiveness. When you just look at red and attractiveness, there is a strong relationship. However, when you account for perceptions of receptivity in the model at the same time, all of the action is in the link from receptivity to attractiveness, and little is left over for red. Stated another way, red leads to attractiveness precisely because it first leads to perceived sexual receptivity. It is receptivity that is 'driving the bus' for the red-attraction relation."

So, now that we know that men view red as attractive because they see it as an invitation for sex, should women be a little more cautious about wearing the color? The researchers say yes. "From a pragmatic standpoint, our results suggest that women may need to be judicious in their use of red clothing," they write. "Wearing red may be a subtle, yet powerful way to communicate sexual interest to a targeted male, but in public settings replete with eager male receivers, a red signal may result in unwanted sexual advances." I told Pazda that some women might bristle at this message, as it puts the onus on them to avoid male interest, instead of making it a man's responsibility to behave himself--no matter what color of shirt or lipstick a gal is wearing.

Did he think women who wear red are "asking for it"?

He answered no (of course), and explained that he thinks wearing red may be a double-edged sword for women, on the one hand making them appear more attractive, but on the other hand making them appear more sexually available. The distinction is subtle but real (and often lost on men): Just because a woman wants to look good at the bar doesn't mean she wants to take someone home from the bar. He added that, "men should be just as judicious when forming impressions about women in red."

Using red ornamentation to signal sex isn't a modern invention. The authors write: "Red was used as early as 10,000 B.C.E. in lipstick and rouge to mimic the red blush of sexual interest and excitation; red has been used in mythology, folklore, and literature throughout the ages to represent sexual promiscuity and passion; and red has long signaled sexual availability in red-light districts." While 12 millennia of societal conditioning have firmly imbued the color red with erotic overtones, the association almost certainly has earlier biological origins.

Still, whether or not a woman is actually looking for sex when she wears red, 12,000 years of red lipstick tells us there's some intention there, even if it's just to get attention. Pazda and Elliot are currently conducting the first study to examine female motivations for wearing red. They're collecting data to see if women on dating sites that cater to one-night-stands and casual sex are more likely to wear red in their profile pictures than women using services that cater to long-term relationships or marriage. Pazda's team is also looking at how women perceive red on men. In that case, it's probably not a sign of sexual availability, but of social status, they say. Turns out, everyone looks good in red.

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Chicago. Follow Jen on Twitter (she's @jenabbasi) and email her at popsci.thesexfiles@gmail.com.

Could Climate Change Make Mount Everest Unclimbable?

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North Face, Mount Everest Luca Galuzzi via Wikimedia
Meanwhile, Nepal asks world to help measure the peak's exact height

Changes on the planet are affecting the world's tallest mountain, casting doubt on its climbability and even its height. Sherpas are wondering whether warmer climates will render Mount Everest too dangerous to summit, and geologic changes in the Himalayas have raised uncertainties about its altitude, according to separate reports.

You might think a warmer climate would render Everest easier to climb - fewer treacherous glaciers and snowbanks and so forth - but the opposite is true. Rockslides are increasing, and it's much more difficult to clamber up bare rocks than to use metal crampons on thick ice. The conditions are deteriorating so much that the mountain may be unclimbable in a few years, according to Apa Sherpa, a Nepali climber who has reached the summit a record 21 times.

Himalayan communities are already facing dramatic climate shifts, according to AFP, which interviewed Apa Sherpa while he's participating in a 120-day hike. Glaciers have shrunk by 21 percent in the past 30 years, and it is getting colder in the winter and hotter in the summer.

Meanwhile, Nepal is soliciting help to re-measure the peak, to settle a dispute over its height. Nepal wants to use Everest's snow height as part of the official altitude measurement, but China, which borders the mountain range, wants to use its rock height. Other peaks get to use the snow height, Nepal points out. This has been the subject of a longstanding dispute between China and Nepal, with the Nepalese government insisting the world's highest peak is 11 feet taller than China says it is.

Changing snowpack aside, this dispute is made even more complex by the Himalayas' dynamic nature - it's a young mountain range that is still rising as the Indian subcontinent slides under Eurasia.

Measuring Everest is no small feat, as the BBC reports. You would need GPS equipment that can function in -50 degree temperatures, sherpas who can operate the technology, and a data processing system that the international community would accept. The last official measurement was in 1999, when an American team using GPS measured a height of 29,035 feet (8,850 meters). Previously, Everest was measured at 29,028 feet (8,848 meters).

[BBC, Discovery News]

German Industrial Bot Takes Up the Art of Portraiture

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Fraunhofer Sketchbot Sketchbot is programmed to ignore your wrinkles and draw a more youthful you. Fraunhofer IOSB
Sketchbot graciously ignores your wrinkles and imperfections

Though he was destined for manual labor, countless days spent toiling in the factory could not dampen this robot's dream. He was built to examine how objects reflect light, but he never failed to see the beauty in the patterns of light bouncing off a mundane object, say a child's backpack. He always wanted to be an artist, he just needed the chance!

Now the robot has been reassigned, fulfilling his ambitions to make awkwardly flabby line drawings of his human masters.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation equipped him with a camera and image processing software. Algorithms translate contrasts in the picture into robotic pencil strokes. The robot was even programmed to overlook a subject's tiny wrinkles, making the portrait-sitter look much more youthful.

The sketching industrial robot will be on display at a conference in Hanover, Germany, next month.

[Fraunhofer Research News]

Video: Flamethrowing Navy Railgun Blasts Terrifying Projectiles Through Superheated Air

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Railgun Blast The Navy is testing its newest electronmagnetic railgun, the first of two industry-built launchers to be delivered. Office of Naval Research
First test fire of new prototype is a success

A new prototype of the Navy's weapon of the future just completed its first test, blasting a chunk of metal through the air at speeds up to 5,600 MPH. Watch below as the Navy's electromagnetic railgun spews a formidable jet of orange flame.

The best part is when the air behind the speeding projectile blurs with heat!

Defense giant BAE Systems delivered the prototype railgun Jan. 30 and the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division just started testing it. The Navy has tested other designs in the lab, but this one is the first industry-built model. Tests will last two months, during which the Navy will check out the railgun's structural integrity and barrel life. Another model, built by General Atomics, is due to be delivered in April.

This one is a 32-megajoule demonstrator, according to the Office of Naval Research - for comparison, one megajoule of energy is equivalent to a 1-ton car thrust at 100 MPH.

The eventual goal is a ship-mounted 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles. It shoots projectiles using electricity instead of chemicals, which would theoretically be safer because you would not have to tote dangerous gunpowder on a ship. It uses an electric field to accelerate a metal conductor between two rails and launch a projectile.

Here's a video of a previous test.

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