A massive tornado devastated suburbs south of Oklahoma City Monday afternoon, and rescue workers continue to search for people trapped by debris. Local TV stations are reporting multiple fatalities throughout the area. [UPDATED: The Oklahoma City medical examiner's office says 24 bodies have been recovered as of Tuesday morning. That number could still rise.]

Preliminary reports from the National Weather Service classify the mile-wide tornado as an EF-4 (the second highest ranking on the Enhanced Fujita scale), with winds greater than 200 mph. The White House has offered the state all possible federal help.

Emergency workers in Moore, Okla., are currently searching for third graders believed to be trapped in Plaza Towers Elementary school, which was destroyed by the tornado. [UPDATED: At 7:30 p.m. ET, KFOR journalist Lance West reported that it is now a recovery mission at the elementary school, and workers are searching for the bodies of about 24 children.] All of the school's fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students are believed to be accounted for.

Video from earlier today showed a building on fire in Moore, amid block after block of flattened homes and businesses. On May 3, 1999, the same suburb was hit by an F5 tornado that killed 41 people and spawned wind gusts up to 318 mph. (The EF scale replaced the Fujita scale as the preferred measurement of tornado strength in the United States in 2007.)

The storm knocked out power at the Draper Water Treatment Plant, and residents of southeast Oklahoma City should not drink tap water until further notice. [UPDATED: The City of Oklahoma City announced via Twitter that water quality was not affected by the power outage and the water supply is safe to drink.]

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Less than half of the rodents, lizards, fish, and other small animals that were lofted skyward last month made it back alive, but nonetheless Russian researchers are calling their so-called "Space Ark" mission--the longest-duration space mission ever dedicated purely to biological study--a success. After spending a month in space, the Russian Bion-M landed slightly off-target but safely in a Russian field yesterday.

The mission, which launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 19, marks the first time animals have flown in space for this long on their own. The study was designed to study the effects of long-term space flight on cell structure.

The animals are now on their way to Moscow for further study during which researchers from the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems (part of the Russian Academy of Sciences) will try to define and understand the effects of long-duration spaceflight on animal cells. That in turn should help pave the way for future human flights into space beyond Earth orbit.

[NBC]

At first glance, Masdar City appears a mirage. From a distance it looks like a single multicolored building, standing lonely on the horizon. Part of the illusion is due to the city's strange setting: next to Abu Dhabi airport, just across the highway from the Arabian Gulf, in a deeply inhospitable stretch of desert. Between it and downtown Abu Dhabi lie 20 miles of the most wasteful urban development I've ever seen-a featureless plain studded with ostentatious walled houses the size of the Supreme Court and crisscrossed by empty six-lane boulevards. But the illusion is also a matter of density. Masdar City, an $18-billion experiment, will hold 40,000 residents in only two square miles.

As the world's most ambitious eco-city, Masdar does not allow cars. Visitors must instead leave their vehicles in a giant garage at the city's northern edge. As I pulled in, a trim Westerner wearing a dark suit despite the heat stepped from the shade to introduce himself. Stephen Severance, a 45-year-old American, is the city's program manager. He came to Masdar four years ago, after working at the consulting firm Booz Allen.

Severance led me past ranks of parked cars to a set of smoky glass doors, which opened with a whoosh upon a marble lobby. Beyond a second glass wall, Masdar's Personal Rapid Transit pods, or PRTs, sat waiting. The little white driverless cars function as an ecological upgrade for passengers who have ditched their outmoded internal-combustion machines. Severance and I took seats facing each other, the automatic door slid closed, and the little pod began scooting through what looked like a gigantic basement at 15 miles an hour. It ran almost silently on rubber tires, following magnets buried in the floor and using proximity sensors to avoid collision.

Under the original plans, the PRTs were supposed to provide transportation across all of Masdar City, Severance explained. But to make space for them beneath the buildings, engineers would have needed to construct the entire city on 20-foot-tall pedestals. They built the existing center of Masdar City in this way-about a third of a square mile-but elevating the whole metropolis was unaffordable. The rest of Masdar will be built at ground level, and its transportation infrastructure remains undetermined: electric buses, perhaps, or solar-powered carts.

Severance gestured at the pod. "This is a little, I don't know, Jetsons," he said. "It was a nice idea, and we've proven that it works. We're running right now on solar power. These cars get where they're going and don't run into each other." But the PRT line that Severance and I boarded was the only functioning one, he told me, and the PRTs follow only one route: from the garage to Masdar Institute, about half a mile.

As the pod slid into its parking space, an electronic voice reminded us to take our belongings. We stepped into the lobby of the PRT terminal underneath the institute and followed a sweeping spiral staircase to an open-air courtyard at street level. A half-dozen mid-rise buildings rose in a cluster, separated by a tight maze of connected courtyards. One building, a terra-cotta-colored apartment house, is home to the 119 students of the Masdar Institute-the city's only residents so far. Another, wrapped in a steel facade, houses the institute itself. Severance led me on a tour of the small and strange collection of businesses that make up the commercial district, among them a sushi restaurant, a coffee shop, a mini supermarket, a travel agency, and a cellphone-company office.

This small, artificial pocket of urbanity didn't feel like the seed of a true metropolis, but that's the plan. Over the next 12 years, this little cluster of buildings will grow into two square miles of dense mixed-use real estate. A recycling plant is already under construction. There will be a functioning smart grid and improved power generation and distribution. The city will draw residents on the promise of quiet walkable streets and a sustainable lifestyle. By 2025, Severance told me, Masdar, Arabic for "source," will have transformed itself from university campus and commercial mishmash to a working city of the future.

THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS

In 2006, the government of Abu Dhabi, the largest and most oil rich of the United Arab Emirates, announced that it intended to spend $22 billion to become a leader in renewable energy. Abu Dhabi is the very definition of a petro-state. About the size of South Carolina, it holds the world's sixth-largest oil reserves-20 percent more than Russia. The U.A.E., a nation that contains fewer people than the Los Angeles metropolitan area, has the third-highest ecological footprint per capita in the world.

Unlikely as it seemed, the government of this tiny state on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf proposed to do something no other nation had seriously attempted. It would build a carbon-neutral, zero-waste city from the ground up on an empty piece of desert. The entire city would be an experiment, a clean-technology incubator on a grand scale, powered by renewable energy projects. A graduate-level, sustainable-technology research university in partnership with MIT would serve as the idea factory, and a fleet of driverless electric cars would shuttle the inhabitants from place to place. Over every building, engineers would mount huge photovoltaic roofs. The initial drawings looked like fantasy. The Entire City Would Be An Experiment, A Clean-Tech Incubator On A Grand Scale.

For such a pillar of the oil economy to express such an interest in renewable energy reeks of either penitence-like the munitions tycoon Alfred Nobel sponsoring a peace prize-or outright fraud. But as the years passed, the project became real. High-efficiency apartment houses, offices, and businesses began to rise. The driverless electric cars materialized-and they worked. The fledgling city consumed less electricity than its solar arrays generated, and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology assembled a faculty of 76 PhDs, 13 of them from MIT. Even at the height of the financial crisis, as renewable energy projects stalled around the world, Masdar City moved forward. In 2009, the International Renewable Energy Agency made the unlikely selection of Abu Dhabi as its world headquarters. Then, in 2011, the Masdar Institute graduated its first class of 70 master's students. But it wasn't until 2012, when the German technology giant Siemens was putting the finishing touches on its new Middle East headquarters in Masdar City, that the experiment morphed from grand gesture to something much more significant: a new and viable model for renewable energy development on a massive scale.

But even a city of the future, muscled into existence by oil money and sheer will, was not immune to the troubles of the present. The financial crisis of 2008 forced planners to scale back their ambitions. After the crash, Masdar shaved about $4 billion from its budget, and engineers had to abandon the most futuristic features. The elaborate solar-collecting roofs disappeared from the drawing board; instead, they'll situate photovoltaic arrays at the edge of town. The PRTs devolved from a citywide system to a parking-garage shuttle. Complicating matters, Masdar had originally intended to desalinate its own water using the sun, but the local well water turns out to be three times as salty as the Gulf's. Desalinating it would require significantly more energy than planned and, perhaps worse, would create a gigantic brine-disposal problem. Instead, Severance told me, Masdar will aggressively monitor the use of water. Compared with the bold vision Masdar once was, the adjusted plans can't help but disappoint.

THE NEW ENERGY MODEL

Oil made settled life possible in Abu Dhabi. The Trucial Coast Oil Development Company discovered the first commercial oil field here in 1960. At the time, the settlement was little more than a collection of camels and bedouin tents, a port where men in loincloths waded through the surf to unload dhows by hand. Then, in less than half a century, oil brought the Emirates from abject poverty to the world's sixth-highest GDP per capita. Abu Dhabi is now a roaring metropolis filled with flamboyant skyscrapers-a tower shaped like a giant coin standing
on edge, another like a 40-story videogame joystick. Commuters drive Ferraris and Jaguars. Malls stock Piaget and Versace.

Yet Emiratis are planning for a post-oil world. In 2002, the Emirates' crown prince, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, ordered the creation of Mubadala Development Corp., an investment firm owned by the government and dedicated to diversifying the nation's economy beyond oil and gas. In 2005, Mubadala's 31-year-old energy chief, Sultan al-Jaber, set off on a seven-month tour of renewable energy projects in such places as South Korea, Germany, and Silicon Valley and reached a very futuristic conclusion. Renewable technology, he determined, was far more mature and practical than the investment world at the time seemed to believe. But the various interests necessary to develop it were not coordinated. Scientists were discovering new materials and technology that stalled before reaching market. Companies tried to market clean-energy products at a steep cost disadvantage to fossil fuels, and government regulators hadn't a clue how to support them. "There wasn't a true champion across the world for renewable energy," Jaber told me. "In Oil And Gas, The Question Is ‘Why Innovate?' Here
It Is ‘Why Not Innovate? Why Do It In The Normal Way If You Don't Have To?' "

Masdar is intended to unify those elements by addressing everything there is to know about renewable energy-from the technology of generation and consumption to the economics of financing projects to the politics of getting them approved. "We're trying to capture the whole thing," said Bader al-Lamki, the 38-year-old director of Masdar Clean Energy, which builds and owns solar projects in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere and has a big stake in a gigantic offshore wind farm near Great Britain. Lamki and I were sitting in a temporary building at the edge of the Masdar City construction site; he adjusted the red-and-white ghotra draped around his head and neck and nodded to a South Asian gentleman in a blue smock serving us tea. "In other places, people are focusing on only one part," he said. "Here, we integrate the whole value chain."

Lamki's division is one of four components of Masdar, the others being the Institute of Science and Technology; Masdar Capital, which bundles investors' money into projects; and the centerpiece city itself. Already, the organization has led renewable energy projects in Spain, Tonga, Mauritania, and elsewhere in the Emirates. One of Lamki's most surprising prospects is in Saudi Arabia, which expects to have to triple its electricity production in the next 20 years. The Saudis already consume within their borders almost a third of the oil they produce, which is in large part due to air conditioning. They're talking with Lamki's group about trying to meet some of their future demand with power from the sun, the one resource the country has in greater abundance than oil.

MAKING SOLAR WORK

If it's to prove anything, Masdar must get solar power right. Abu Dhabi, where the temperature reaches 120°F and every drop of water must be desalinated, now burns so much natural gas to generate power that it has become a net importer. With Masdar, the country is trying to show that it can create huge quantities of electricity without fossil fuels.

Masdar has spawned a handful of solar projects so far, but the largest is a concentrated solar power plant about a hundred miles from the city; on my second day, I drove out to see it. This part of the Arabian Peninsula looks less like the billowing-dune set of Lawrence of Arabia than like a vast plain of kitty litter. Crossing it in a rented marshmallow of a Kia was a 90-minute experiment in sensory deprivation. Airborne dust so obscured the horizon that the beige desert blended seamlessly with a beige sky.

Humans have generated heat by concentrating the sun's rays at least since Archimedes reportedly used mirrors to torch a Roman fleet attacking Syracuse in the third century B.C. Masdar's plant contains 192 parabolic-mirrored troughs, each a little longer than a football field and nearly 20-feet wide. A glass-clad steel pipe full of oil runs above each trough, at the focal point of the parabola. In the five minutes it takes electric pumps to push a gallon of oil up one trough and down another, the gathered rays of the sun heat that oil to a blistering 740°F. After leaving the troughs, the hot pipes pass through a chamber of water. The heat from the oil converts the water to steam, which turns a turbine. The cooled oil then flows back to the mirrored troughs for reheating. Computer-operated hydraulic pistons constantly rotate the mirrors to trace the sun's arc across the sky.

After a safety briefing in a trailer, I donned a hard hat, joined a group of engineers, and was shuttled by truck into the reflector field. One of the troughs was pointed sideways for maintenance, so we walked along it to get a good look. By the time we reached the end, the heat was so intense that it had all but set the backs of our pants on fire.

Concentrated solar technology has been around for decades, but the Masdar plant was, when I visited last December, the biggest such project in the world. (This year, it will be surpassed by one near Phoenix and one in northern Nevada; several more, as much as four times the size of Masdar's, are under construction worldwide.) It is growing fast, with almost two gigawatts-enough to power up to two million homes-expected online worldwide by the end of 2013 and four times that under contract. That's small compared with other renewables, such as photovoltaic power, which generated 20 times as much electricity worldwide at the end of 2010, and wind, which generated 100 times as much that same year. But concentrated solar has advantages that wind and PV lack. Of the three, it alone generates heat, which, in addition to providing power, can be used to do things like desalinate water. And unlike photovoltaic, concentrated solar power plants can also contribute power much more cheaply at night because they store energy as heat instead of in expensive batteries. A Masdar-affiliated company built three concentrated solar power plants in Spain that use molten salt as its medium, improving heat capture and storage even further.Masdar Is A Model For Innovation, A Place Dedicated To The Generation Of Sustainable Ideas.

"Masdar wanted to make this simple and big, the first of its kind in the Middle East," said Laurent Longuet, the plant's project manager. Longuet came from the French oil-and-gas company Total and found the transition to the renewables world a pleasant shock. "Oil guys are very conservative," he said. "In oil and gas, the question is ‘Why innovate?' Here, it's ‘Why not innovate? Why do it in the normal way if we don't have to?' "

As we spoke, Longuet surprised me by conceding that his plant, though brand-new, is essentially obsolete. One of the concentrated solar power plants that Masdar built in Spain uses clustered mirrors around a central tower instead of parabolic troughs, which generates much higher temperatures. Also, between the time Longuet started building the Masdar plant in July 2010 and the day he switched it on in December, Chinese companies so flooded the market with inexpensive photovoltaic panels that concentrated solar lost a lot of its cost advantage. "If this turns out to be a transitional technology, that's okay," said Abdulaziz al-Obaidli, a wiry young Emirati engineer on Longuet's staff. "We're learning about optics. We're learning about metallurgy, astronomy, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, manufacturing processes. It's not just about power generation." Obaidli also pointed out that the plant, obsolete or not, works. It can continue generating electricity for decades with, essentially, zero fuel costs.

INSIDE THE ENERGY LABS

The more time I spent at Masdar, the more I realized that every aspect of the city is a research project. Cloaked in a brushed steel facade, the Masdar Institute is a warren of electronics-cluttered benches, humming machinery, and glass dividers covered with algorithms scrawled in grease pencil. Each lab focuses on a different kind of technology. In the Bio-Energy and Environmental Lab, students are developing microbial fuel cells that could generate power while remediating waste. In the Smart Technology for Electric Vehicles and Automotive Systems lab, they are designing integrated networks that could connect drivers and vehicles to road and traffic conditions. There are labs that focus on artificial intelligence, nano-materials, nano-scale energy storage, solar cells, and more.

In the microsystems lab, I met Jerald Yoo, a professor of engineering from South Korea. Sitting at a bench littered with bits of wire and tools, he held up a black T-shirt with a silvery pattern silk-screened on it. "Printed circuits," he said. Someday, he said, circuitry embedded into our clothes will constantly monitor our health, perhaps sending regular updates to our phones. That could have big implications for those with health conditions; for example, Yoo told me, bandages with his circuits could detect seizures 10 seconds before they happen. With that much warning, he said, a current can be applied to supress the seizure. I asked how his project related to Masdar's goal of an energy-sustainable future. "The circuits have to consume extremely little energy," he said. "Masdar's mission is not only how to produce energy sustainably but also how to consume the least energy to do the work."

The institute's marquee project is a gigantic tower of mirrors on the edge of town called the Beam Down Solar Thermal Concentrator. The device not only concentrates solar rays to generate heat but will one day also split light into various wavelengths for scientific experiments, thermal energy production, and even more efficient energy generation. Its mastermind is Matteo Chiesa, a young Norwegian professor of nano-science who doused me with a fire hose of technical jargon in the apparent belief that I, too, held a PhD in applied mechanics. I nodded politely as he paced his office in a T-shirt and sandals, pulling on his long, wild hair. He struck me as a little stir-crazy. Chiesa has been in Masdar for five years-he claims to have been the institute's 37th employee-and in that time, he and his colleagues have published more than 60 scientific papers. I asked him whether he liked being here. "Happiness means death," he said. Until other residents beyond the students and faculty at the institute begin to call Masdar home, the place and its inhabitants will remain pretty isolated.

THE IMPOSSIBLE CITY

One particularly blazing afternoon, I joined Stephen Severance on a stone bench in the center of Masdar City. I wanted an impression of life in the city of the future. What struck me first was the almost shocking quiet of the place, devoid, as it was, of horns, idling trucks, and sirens. Then, I noticed the temperature. It was much cooler here than in downtown Abu Dhabi. For one thing, we were out of reach of the sun. Severance pointed out that the designers had angled the densely packed buildings to maximally shade one another and the courtyards in between. Pedestrians like us could sit in comfort and the buildings themselves require less air conditioning. Also keeping us cool was a stiff breeze. Severance stood and motioned me across the courtyard to a hollow tower on steel legs-a vertical tube 20 feet across and five stories high. The tower acts as a wind catcher, drawing in cool breezes from above the city and directing them down to the courtyard. The street-level breezes it generates are constant and virtually free. It's not a modern invention-wind towers are likely Persian in origin and were used centuries before oil brought wealth to this part of the world. Engineers at Masdar improved upon the tradition by mounting computer-operated louvers at the top of the structure to maximize efficiency; the panels open and close according to prevailing winds. They also added misting units to cool the air even further.

On my way back to the hotel in Abu Dhabi, I made a wrong turn and ended up at the Al Wathba camel-race track, an eight-kilometer oval etched onto the hard, brown floor of the desert. From where I stood, in a grandstand built for thousands, the track disappeared into the distant haze.
I wandered down to the bedlam of the starting gate, expecting to be shooed away; instead, a beaming youth bearing a silver urn offered me tea in a china cup. As the camels lined up for the day's third race, I noticed that they had on their backs not human riders but a metal contraption with a three-foot stick poking out the back. I struck up a conversation with a nearby cameraman, who turned out to be covering the race for Egyptian television. He explained that camel owners had pressed generations of children into service as jockeys, but after enough of them fell off and were trampled to death, the federation that regulates the sport ordered them replaced with robots.

The camels were lean and long-legged-genetically engineered at tremendous expense for speed and endurance. As they took off with their weird slow-motion gait, a phalanx of SUVs roared after them on a track, weaving for position and blaring their horns in a jumbled, parallel race. Each vehicle contained a trainer, shouting at his camel through a loudspeaker attached to the beast's robot and stabbing at a button to remotely rap the beast with the three-foot stick. The trainers were in turn taking orders from the camels' owners, who were watching at home on television and barking instructions via cellphone. The strategy, the cameraman explained, is to use the stick only when the camera is not on one's own camel, because a camel seen on television as needing the stick is a less valuable camel than one that is not.

In the explosion of wealth and unchecked development that is Abu Dhabi, where ancient technology anchors a futuristic city and where robots ride camels, Masdar attempts to corral it all into a plan. Critics can complain that Masdar's goals have been tempered, but that doesn't make them irrelevant. If designers had not scaled back during the financial crisis, it would have signaled that the project was little more than a pricy plaything for an oil-rich emir. Instead, Masdar is bound to real-world economics, which means that it can teach real-world lessons. "You can talk about environmental sustainability all you want," Lamki had told me, "but there has to be economic sustainability too."

No one I spoke to during my visit to Masdar was under the illusion that the city was perfect. The world is not about to tear down its infrastructure and start over with walkable, solar-powered, smart-grid cities. In that regard, Masdar will never be a model for development. It is instead a model for innovation, a place dedicated more to the generation of sustainable ideas than sustainable technology. In creating an irreproducible city-isolated, expensive, and nearly empty-the architects of Masdar may be building a better place for us all.

Writer Dan Baum lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is the author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip.

A well-known promoter of cold fusion technology-who's been demonstrating his latest invention here and there over the past two years-has announced that an independent third party has verified his machine works. That is, it creates a large amount of energy in the form of heat, far more than it consumes.

If Andrea Rossi's cold fusion reactor, called the E-Cat, really worked, it could power the world cheaply and without pollutants. Rossi has previously backed out of third-party testing with NASA and the University of Bologna in Italy, as Popular Science reported in November, but now he's saying that a team has tested the E-Cat.

His new third party verification says the E-Cat creates at least tenfold more power than energy sources at work today. A paper about the tests is available on arXiv, a database for publishing physics papers, often before they're peer reviewed. The paper, which is not peer-reviewed, leaves out crucial details, for example referring to "unknown additives" instead of specifying what chemicals actually go into the reaction.

There's plenty of reason to be skeptical. Rossi has a history of blocking even simple tests of the E-Cat. Many established experts are skeptical of his invention and with the idea that cold fusion is even possible. Even among those who work on cold fusion-often tinkerers not associated with major research institutions-Rossi doesn't necessarily inspire confidence. He has previously passed off spurious inventions, including a machine that was supposed to turn waste into oil.

In the jungles of Belize last January, entomologist Alex Wild noticed something odd about the trap-jaw ants passing through his outdoor insect photography class: They all had shrunken heads and swollen abdomens. A day after making the observation, Wild and his students came upon an ant with a worm bursting out of its side. Parasites were at work. Nematode worms enter the ants as larvae and grow inside the ants' body cavity, siphoning off nutrients and distorting their hosts' natural anatomy. When the eight-inch-long nematodes are ready to mate a few weeks later, they push their way out of their half-inch-long hosts, killing them.

INFECTED

In the abdomen of a trap-jaw ant, a parasitic nematode lives off nutrients from the surrounding fluids and changes the morphology of its host.

HEALTHY

The jaws of a parasite-free worker can snap shut on prey in just 1/10,000 of a second-the fastest known mechanical action in nature.

The devastation wrought by the mile-wide, EF-4 tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., and south Oklahoma City yesterday is really difficult to put into words. You could start with the huge path of destruction, more than a mile wide at places, that wiped entire neighborhoods clean off the map like they were never even there. It's more difficult when you get to the two elementary schools--concrete and cinder block buildings that gave way to the truly devastating force of this storm.

It's tough to describe and easier to show. And given the camera-fication of everything these days, there's plenty of footage floating around the web today, enough that one can pretty much reconstruct this twister--which was on the ground for 40 minutes with winds up to 200 miles per hour--from start to finish. Which is exactly what we've done below.

1. In Newcastle, Okla., (just southwest of Moore and due west of Norman), the funnel drops from the sky and starts picking up steam (and debris).

2. By the time this thing reaches Moore, it's a monster. Even seasoned storm chasers can't believe what they are seeing.

3. It doesn't get better. The video below begins with footage shot near South Moore High School but culminates with scenes shot from a devastated neighborhood just minutes after the storm more or less flattened it.

4. Another perspective captured by a storm chaser from the east side of Moore offers a clear view of the massive, swirling debris field gathered by the funnel. At this point the tornado has traveled roughly three-quarters of its total journey and is tearing through the heart of Moore.

5. Just west of Lake Stanley Draper the tornado stops moving and begins to rope out and dissipate.

6. And of course there's the timelapse, which quickly conveys--in a few brief, sped-up clips--just how destructive this storm was as it gathered steam and then slammed into the sprawling suburbia of Moore.

The best way for researchers to get information about a tornado is to send sensors high up into the storm-a maneuver that is too dangerous for a manned aircraft and, up until now, has been too complex for most remote-controlled craft.

Engineering students at Oklahoma State University have designed three concept drones that may solve this problem. Three teams of students came up with plans for Storm Penetrating Air Vehicles (SPAVs). The goal is for these remotely piloted machines to ultimately replace storm chasers, who risk life and limb driving after tornadoes to capture data.

Here's what the drones needed to be able to do:

• Take off from a typical road
• Be transportable by a standard flat-bed trailer
• Lift off and land in 22 mph winds, with gusts of up to 28 mph
• Fly for at least four hours at 5,000 feet without refueling
• Carry at least one, preferably multiple, dropsondes into the weather system

Dropsondes? Dropsondes are cylinders full of sensors that can be dropped or carried (by aircraft or balloons) into storms, where they rapidly collect and transmit data about humidity, temperature, windspeed, and wind direction. The National Center for Atmospheric Research uses dropsondes to study hurricanes.

The SPAVs could serve as more powerful, reusable dropsondes, with onboard sensors for temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, altitude, GPS, and dew point depression, as well as an optical and infrared camera.

While these are only concepts for now, Jamey Jacob, the Oklahoma State University professor in charge of the project, is in talks with the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech, and the University of Oklahoma to develop these systems for use by first responders.

Currently, there's no direct way for the Federal Aviation Administration to authorize such flights into storms, though Jacob told Popular Science that a professor at UC Boulder has received special exemptions in the past. It seems likely that these kind of unmanned vehicles will be covered by new FAA rules, which are set to allow drones into commercial airspace starting in 2015.

It would take a lot of food to get astronauts to Mars, but what if they could get whatever they wanted at the push of a button?

NASA is funding an ambitious 3-D printing food project that wants to make that happen, Quartz reports. The space agency's handing over to mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor and his company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, to spend building a prototype universal food synthesizer. And it could make pizza.

Contractor's food synthesizer would print layers of food from cartridges of powders and oils, creating a perfectly nutritious meal. (It can actually print from any "organic" material with the right ingredients inside, so insect-based pizza may be the proteinaceous meal of choice.) Contractor has already made a chocolate printer as a proof of concept, and now is moving on to a pizza printer.

A pie's a good candidate for this because its made from discrete sections. Each print head would only have the job of printing : either the dough, which would be cooked by a hot plate while being printed; the sauce, which would be a mixture of tomato powder, oil, and water; or the ambiguous, gross-sounding "protein layer," which could be made from milk, animals, or plants.

The cartridges would all have a 30-year shelf-life, enough time for, say, a trip to Mars. The astronauts can switch to real cooking once they get there.

[Quartz via Verge]

It's widely acknowledged that Phytophthora infestans, a sort of fungus-like pathogen also known as potato blight, was responsible for the mid-19th-century potato famine that reduced Ireland's population, through death and emigration, by nearly 25 percent. But scientists have just uncovered the specific strain of this pathogen through a first-of-its kind procedure--by analyzing potato plants that have been dead for more than a hundred years.

The Irish Potato Famine lasted just a few years, from around 1845 to 1852, but killed about a million people and forced the emigration of around a million more. The Irish population at that point was reliant on one specific white potato, the Irish lumper, as a primary food source for about a third of the country. Potatoes, like most other members of the nightshade family (tomatoes, eggplant), are native to the New World, not to Ireland. In the mid-19th century, travel between the New and Old World increased, bringing over new strains of Phytophthora infestans. One of those strains eventually mutated into a killer.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology took dried plants, some from as far back as 170 years ago, and found that there was still trace amounts of DNA from the Phytophthora infestans. Previously, it was assumed that a strain known as US-1 was responsible for the Irish Potato Famine, but this research found that the strain on these dried potato plants is not, in fact, US-1. It's related, but genetically unique, and US-1 was more likely to be the strain that replaced the culprit after it was eliminated. They've named the new strain HERB-1.

This is the first time that scientists have decoded the genome of a plant pathogen from dried plants, and the researchers say that the study holds promise for the future. "These findings will greatly help us to understand the dynamics of emerging pathogens," one of the researchers says.

The study will appear in a coming issue of the journal eLife.

Over the last century, the U.S. has depleted enough of its underground freshwater supply to fill Lake Erie twice, according to a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey. Here's another way to understand how much water we've used. Just between 2000 and 2008, the latest period in the study and the period of fastest depletion, Americans brought enough water aboveground to contribute to 2 percent of worldwide ocean level rise in that time.

"We think it's serious," Leonard Konikow, the U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who performed the study, tells Popular Science. "It's more serious in certain areas."

Lowering aquifers mean less local water for the communities that depend upon them. They can also suck dry springs, wetlands and other surface water features, Konikow wrote in a report the survey published yesterday. Scientists don't always have a tally for how much water an aquifer holds, however, so it's more difficult to say what percentage of the U.S.' overall groundwater is gone. (In some systems, it's difficult to determine where the bottom of the aquifer is, Konikow explains.)

The problem also varies in severity in different parts of the country. In the most depleted aquifers, including those underneath the southern High Plains and Texas, "more than 50 percent of the thickness of the aquifers has been dried up," Konikow says. In Alabama and Mississippi, rice farmers have taken out large volumes of water, but there also seems to be a lot of water left. Meanwhile, two aquifers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho actually held more water in 2008 than they did in 1900. Those were the only U.S. aquifers to gain water over the study period.

Water collects in underground aquifers in many ways, sometimes over thousands of years. When people pump it to the surface to irrigate their crops, for example, some of it does seep back into the Earth and into the aquifer. Rainfall and rivers all carry water back into the ground and in some areas, the local government even pumps water underground in an effort to maintain their aquifers. Nevertheless, those two Lake Eries' worth of water refers to how much net groundwater the U.S. has lost, as people are taking it out much faster than it's going in.

Konikow's report doesn't say much about what will happen to the people and industries that sit on top of depleting aquifers, but a recent New York Times article offers a glimpse. On Sunday, the paper reported on falling water levels in the High Plains Aquifer, which lies north-south from Wyoming and South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle. In Kansas, the aquifer fell by an average of 4.25 feet in 2011 and 2012. Some wells fell by as much as 30 feet. The changes mean harder times for farmers and a shift away from thirsty crops, such as corn, toward less water-intensive activities, such as growing sorghum or ranching, the Times reported.

Warming weather could make summer in the city deadly in the next few decades, according to a study published this week in Nature Climate Change. By the 2020s, New York City will see 22 percent more heat-related deaths per year compared with 1980s, the researchers predicted.

Urban centers like New York City are especially sensitive to extreme temperatures because of the heat island effect. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the annual mean temperature of a city with a million or more people can be up to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than its more rural surroundings. (NYC currently clocks in with more than 8 million.)

Using 16 computer models of present and future climate change, scientists at Columbia University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that while warmer temperatures would reduce the number of deaths due to cold in the winter, the increase in heat-related deaths in summer months would cause a net 6.2 percent spike in weather-related mortality per year in the city by the 2020s.

By the 2080s, there could be as much as a 91 percent increase in heat deaths compared to 1980s levels:

"What our study suggests is that the heat effects of climate change dominate the winter warming benefits that might also come: climate change will cause more deaths through heat than it will prevent during winter," lead author Patrick Kinney, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, told The Guardian.

The study did not take into account potential changes in the use of air conditioning, heat alerts or cooling shelters in the future. Those factors can help mitigate the risk of extreme heat for vulnerable populations like the elderly.

[The Guardian]

Today, Microsoft unveiled its new console, Xbox One, from its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. There's still going to be news coming out between now and another announcement at E3 in June (which we'll be at), but this is what we saw so far.

TV, TV, TV

This is just barely a gaming console. Microsoft is pitching it as something more like a Living Room Entertainment Box. For about half of today's presentation, no games were even mentioned; instead, Microsoft opted to show the ways Xbox One is integrated with TV. It functions sort of like an amped-up Google TV: it's a command center that hooks up to a cable box and allows you to control what's happening on TV through gestures and voice control. You can switch between TV, games, and a web browser--all through a single system. Say "Xbox on" and the console fires up, then "Switch to TV" or "Switch to internet" and it flips over.

ALWAYS ONLINE

One big, controversial rumor was that the Xbox One would require an internet connection to play any games. That's turned out to be both true and false. Your games are downloaded to the console's hard drive, but certain features in certain games may require an internet connection. It's up to the game-makers to decide if they want to use those.

[Update: According to Kotaku, you will need to connect to the internet at least once a day, even if you're not looking to play a game online.]

But there are apparently some restrictions on used games. The first time you use a game, it gets tied up to your Xbox account. If you want to move that to other accounts, you'll need to pay a fee.

NEW LOOK

This is actually a pretty major departure from the Xbox 360's design at launch. The controller, as predicted, looks fairly similar, but the sleek black console-box is a far cry from the white-and-green 360 we saw before a black version was adopted. That makes sense: after all, if this is something meant to work as more than just a console, it needs to be able to disappear in the living room.

NEW HARDWARE

The Xbox did get a bump in power (obviously): it'll have 8GB of RAM, USB 3.0, a fancy Blu-ray player, and an HDMI in port, but more interesting is probably the overhaul of Kinect. The Xbox's motion-sensitive camera looks like it'll be better at picking up movement, with a 1080p camera replacing the lower-res VGA sensor of the last generation. Microsoft also announced that the gadget would automatically respond to a specific user's voice and movement patterns. In other words, it knows you, and just you. Apparently that new Kinect is a mandatory feature, too.

GAMES

This is last for a reason. For better or worse, Microsoft seems to be backing off the idea of a console devoted only, or even mostly, to games. Even an announcement seemingly about the popular Halo game series ended up being an announcement about a live-action Halo TV series.

There's a racing game (Forza Motorsport 5) and the new Call of Duty: Ghosts (in a promotional video, they made a big deal out of the game featuring a dog, for some reason). There's also a partnership between Microsoft and EA for a slew of sports games, including the next edition of the popular FIFA series. More original franchises, they say, are on the way. We'll probably see more when Microsoft takes to the more game-centric E3 next month for another announcement.

"PlayStation" is a literal description of what you do with it: it's a station at which you play. Nintendo has released systems with "game" in the name--Game Boy, GameCube. But Xbox doesn't mean much of anything. Originally it stood for, in charming Microsoft fashion, "DirectX Box," as it used the familiar DirectX graphics technology. Now? It's just a box. Who knows what it does?

And that's fitting, because the Xbox One, newly announced today, is barely a games device.

Of course I'm going to get one. But I would have loved to have seen one game I could get excited about. #XboxReveal

— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) May 21, 2013

Microsoft spent the first half of the Xbox announcement on non-gaming elements of the system. People tuned in, excited to hear about the first new Xbox in eight years, and Microsoft talked about voice control and motion sensing navigation, the addition of live TV, Skype integration, a new guide that lets you search by show/actor/genre, how to connect your cable box to the new Xbox, and a new TV show from Steven Spielberg. After all that, there were some games, but even the games were tempered with non-game parts; the new version of Madden NFL has a fantasy football integration, the new Halo will have a standalone TV show exclusive to the Xbox.

This is all because the Xbox isn't a games console: it's Microsoft's living room device. This generation, there are only two consoles on the market that cater to hardcore gamers (the Xbox and the PS4). Microsoft already has locked down a fair number of exclusive franchises, and isn't trying to reinvent the gaming wheel, which makes the Xbox unlikely to fail. That means this isn't really a battle; Microsoft doesn't have to beat Sony at all. It'll sell plenty of consoles and games by just cruising. The real game is to get non-gamers to buy Xboxes, and the Xbox One is a ridiculously high-level entertainment device.

Let's say you don't play games at all. Not your thing! But you are an American, and as such you spend hours and hours a day watching TV and movies. And because it is 2013, and the new season of "Arrested Development" is only available on Netflix, you have to have some kind of way to connect your TV to the internet.

Your options: use a "smart TV," which are usually designed in a way that couldn't be less smart, or get a box. Roku and Apple TV are the two most successful; they are very small boxes that cost around $100 and have apps to watch things.

Or: the Xbox One. The Xbox integrates your existing cable box or, presumably, HD antenna, so you don't have to use multiple remotes or switch between inputs. It has a pretty guide for this input. It has a web browser and Skype, which neither Roku nor Apple TV have. It has more apps than the Apple TV (including HBO Go and Amazon), and integrates with your computer, tablet, or smartphone (provided you're using Microsoft products) better than Roku. It has a crazy-futuristic control scheme; you can turn it on by talking to it, you can navigate by waving your arms, you can yell at it and the thing listens and obeys.

And, of course, if you want to play games, it's good at that, too.

It'll be more expensive than $100--we don't know how much yet, but $350 or $400, with the Kinect, wouldn't be surprising--but you get so much more. It makes existing media devices seem like little toys from some decade past. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a well-used Xbox One in a house with no games--it's a tremendously capable and forward-thinking gadget even without that element.

Defense Distributed's plastic, 3-D printed "Liberator" single-shot handgun was here for a moment and then it was gone in more than one sense. For one, the news cycle turned over. Moreover, the State Department came down on Defense Distributed asking it to pull the CAD file for the Liberator off its servers until the lawyers could figure out if putting a free, downloadable CAD file up on the Web violated any arms export regulations. But the Liberator is back and--presumably to Defense Distributed co-founder Cody Wilson's glee--it is evolving.

By the time the State Department asked Defense Distributed to pull down the CAD file for the Liberator, it was already replicating across the Web. And one of the people who appears to have gotten his hands on it is a Wisconsin engineer who identified himself to Forbes only as "Joe." Joe has printed what he adorably calls the "Lulz Liberator" on a $1,725 Lulzbot A0-101 consumer-grade 3-D printer--a printer that is far less expensive than the industrial-grade one used by Wilson and company to create the original Liberator, which essentially was a disposable pistol--one shot and the barrel breaks, requiring the user to print another.

Joe's Lulz Liberator--cost: $25--successfully fires eight rounds through a single barrel (and a ninth round through a replacement barrel) in the video below, proving that plastic guns have already leapt beyond the one-shot-per-print limitation. The Lulz Liberator is still a single-shot weapon--that is, it only holds a single round at a time--but it can be reloaded and fired multiple times using a single barrel.

Joe made his Lulz Liberator from PA-747 ABS plastic, a standard kind of ABS that is the working material for most consumer-grade 3-D printers. Yet he claims that it's stronger than the more expensive stuff Wilson prints with in his larger, more costly Stratasys printer. Joe also augmented his version with a few components not found on the original Liberator, which is all plastic except for the firing pin made from a standard nail. The Lulz Liberator uses a metal nail for a firing pin, but also employs metal screws--available for pennies at your local hardware store--to hold the body of the firearm together rather than relying on plastic pins as Wilson's does. And like Wilson's, it contains a non-functioning piece of steel designed to bring it into alignment with the Undetectable Firearms Act.

The Lulz Liberator reportedly misfired several times during tests, and some of the screws and firing pins had to be replaced throughout the testing. Reloading is also no simple matter; each spent .380 cartridge expanded enough that they had to be pounded free of the chamber with a hammer. So it's not like the Lulz Liberator is a rapid-fire, or even a semi-rapid fire plastic firearm.

What it is: A confirmation that Wilson's Liberator design indeed functions the way he says it does, as well as proof that now that this thing is out there in the maker ecosystem it's going to evolve independent of Wilson and Defense Distributed.

One key difference between Wilson's Liberator and Joe's Lulz Liberator: the Lulz Liberator design file is not available for download online and it's unclear if or when Joe might release it into the wild. But it doesn't really matter. Defense Distributed's file is still circulating out there, and it's unlikely Joe is the only maker out there tinkering with new ways to make better firearms from cheap plastic.

[Forbes]

A copy of the genetic code of an H7N9 avian flu-similar to, but not exactly the same as the flu that has killed 36 people in China-arrived in a lab in Boston Easter Sunday, 2011. By Saturday, scientists had made a vaccine against it, the Boston Globe reported.

That turnaround time is weeks faster than the current best vaccine-making methods. The new shot-making strategy still needs to undergo approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It also needs tweaking before it would able to make the large amounts of vaccine needed during a flu outbreak, the editors of the journal Science wrote in a summary of the work. If the method does make it to market, however, it could speed the response to flu pandemics.

"I think it does have great potential for more rapidly preparing vaccines for new strains as they evolve," Robert Finberg, chair of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a flu researcher, told the Boston Globe.

The new method uses synthetic biology, or the creation of biological materials, such as viruses, without using nature's usual reproductive methods. In this case, scientists from the U.S. pharmaceutical company Novartis and from the J. Craig Venter Institute built H7N9 viruses from looking at the genetic code they received on Easter. Normally, vaccine manufacturers don't make copies of a flu virus simply from a "paper" (In this case it was electronic, like an email) copy of its code. They actually have to have some virus to make more virus.

It's as if in the past, scientists always needed to have a burger on hand to make more burgers. The Novartis and J. Craig Venter Institute scientists, on the other hand, looked at a recipe for a burger and made more burgers from individual ingredients. Scientists around the world have previously used synthetic biology to engineer bacteria. J. Craig Venter, namesake of the institute involved in making the new vaccine, made a bacterium almost entirely from scratch in 2010.

Once they had their synthetic H7N9, scientists made a vaccine from a benign form of the virus that stimulates the human immune system, but can't give people the actual flu. They also came up with some other innovations helped them speed the vaccine-making process. The Boston Globe has more details.

Making the original virus synthetically helps with speed because it's much faster to send electronic copies of a virus' code around the world than it is to carefully ship samples of the actual virus, MIT Technology Review reported.

The biggest bottleneck now is performing the tests that will convince regulatory agencies that this method makes safe, effective vaccines, the Science editors wrote. Science published a paper about the synthetic vaccine last week.

Click to launch the gallery.

Satellites from NASA, NOAA, and others captured the devastating tornado that this week destroyed many towns and houses and claimed the lives of several (the exact death toll is still unclear) in Oklahoma. Click above for a tour through those shots.

[via Flickr]

In the wake of the scandal around the winner of the World Press Photo award, which was found to have been manipulated significantly with Photoshop, it seems like the right time to discuss this sort of editing. Our sister publication, American Photo, has an excellent interview with Fred Ritchin, a professor at NYU, author, photojournalist, and activist against unannounced digital manipulation of images. Check out the full interview here.