In an attempt to recreate the plot of multiple recent superhero movies, a team of Australian scientists is looking into the regenerative properties of salamanders--and into how humans can pull off the same trick.

Salamanders, specifically the axolotl, are vertebrates that can regenerate limbs and organs, which sure would be a useful technique for humans to have, too. So researchers, led by James Godwin, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, figured out how salamanders pull it off. Godwin suspected that macrophages, cells that work in the immune system, played a part. When he and his colleagues removed the macrophages from the axolotls, the axolotls couldn't regenerate limbs: instead, they ended up with scarring and stumps. (A study on that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

Some sort of chemical cocktail is being released by the macrophages, Godwin speculates, and if that's discovered, maybe the cocktail could be used to on humans to cause regeneration.

That... is pretty ambitious. Although others, like the Department of Defense, have been looking into similar processes, another researcher, speaking with ABC Science, said the technique might be more important for scarless healing, or treating burns. Still, it's cool to imagine a world where losing a limb doesn't mean it's gone forever.

[ABC Science]

A team of researchers in the Canadian Arctic is reporting on an interesting find: bacteria that thrive at -15 degrees Celsius. That is the coldest environment bacteria have ever been found to grow in.

The McGill University researchers traveled to Ellesmere Island in (far, far) north Canada. There they collected and later cultured about 200 microbes, putting the organisms in a simulation of their native environment to find the one best-suited for living in extreme conditions. The winner ended up being a strain of Planococcus halocryophilus, which made its home in tiny veins of salty water in the Arctic permafrost. The researchers have reported that the bacteria can grow in those harsh conditions, and survive at temperatures down to -25 degrees Celsius.

The fact that the bacteria can survive at those temperatures is cool alone, but it also has implications for the search for bacteria (living or gone) on Mars and Saturn's moon Enceladus. Both Mars and Enceladus may have salty, super-cold places similar to the places where this bacteria made its home. (That, in general, is a big reason so many scientists are interested in digging for completely new, "alien" species in the Arctic.)

So what makes this bacterium so tough? The team examined its genome and cellular structure to find out, and determined it had an abnormal amount of cold-resistant proteins and especially well-adapted membranes.

We've seen plenty of 3-D printed medical implants for patients that require replacement tissues, but this use of 3-D printed biopolymer to augment and correct an existing tissue highlights just how amazing the convergence of 3-D printing and medicine is (and will be). Kaiba Gionfriddo was born apparently a normal, healthy baby, but at six months of age he stopped breathing. Regularly. Due to a condition known as tracheobronchomalacia Kaiba's windpipe was collapsing during regular breathing, and he had to be hooked to a ventilator to be kept alive.

Short of conventional options, Kaiba's doctors contacted researchers at the University of Michigan who had been experimenting with 3-D printed bio-absorbable polymers. Using high resolution imaging to build a digital picture of Kaiba's trachea, they were able to print a customized biopolymer tracheal splint for the infant using a 3-D printer.

The splint was surgically sewn around Kaiba's airways in February of last year. Just 21 days later he was taken off the ventilator and hasn't been back on it since. His trachea is now growing normally around the splint, which will fully absorb into his body after two to three years. With a little ingenuity, a condition that could've plagued Kaiba for his entire life--and likely would have had he been born ten years ago--has been cured.

One of the doctors who worked on the 3-D printed tracheal splint called Kaiba's case "the highlight of my career so far." Given the vast potential for 3-D printing to work what used to be considered miracles in medicine, that may not remain the case for long.

[Science Daily via Gizmodo]

BBC's Future Media North Lab has created a responsive radio that's capable of changing the broadcast you hear based on your location, your proximity to the device and other factors.

The Perceptive Radio premiered at the Thinking Digital conference yesterday in Gateshead, U.K.

The WiFi-streaming radio features a computer-generated voice that pulls data from external sources and can vary its references to the location of the listener and tailor weather-related references like "it's sunny" or "it's raining" accordingly. Its microphone monitors background noise and can adjust audio levels for specific sounds, amplifying speech and reducing background sounds, for example, if you're sitting farther away.

According to The Next Web, the BBC's Ian Forrester has suggested that it could be used in homes to create a kind of radio-drama karaoke that audiences could participate in.

BBC technologist Tony Churnside told BBC News it represents "the early stages of looking at what next-generation broadcasting is." He compared it to responsive web design, shaping the user's experience based on the different devices they might be on.

You can see a demonstration here of a short audio drama about a woman stuck in an elevator produced with Perceptive Media technology.

[BBC News]

Since Viagra came on the scene in the late '90s, men with sexual disfunction have been able to pop a pill and get busy to their hearts' content. For women, it's harder: There's not yet a cure for a lack of female arousal, though as many as 30 percent of women between 20 and 60 years old may suffer from some degree of hypoactive sexual-desire disorder (H.S.D.D.), a lack of lust so dire it creates emotional distress, according to a New York Times Magazine story.

In an adaptation from his forthcoming book, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, Daniel Bergner explores a new drug called Lybrido, a potential pharmaceutical answer to H.S.D.D. in women being heralded as the "female Viagra"--a drug that could save the sex lives of women whose desire has disappeared.

The scientific process of female desire isn't entirely understood, and we certainly haven't figured out how to bend it to our will. Women aren't as in tune to rises in genital blood flow, according to some research, and a possible reason why Viagra-like drugs haven't yet succeeded in increasing their desire.

Viagra's approach to impotence is a physical one: increase blood flow and let the magic happen. Lybrido and its sister medication, Lybridos, wouldn't be that, although the former does contain a Viagra-like component. "A female-desire drug would be something else," Bergner writes. "It would adjust the primal and executive regions of the brain. It would reach into the psyche."

The drug's inventor, Dutch psychopharmacologist Adriaan Tuiten, says he was inspired by his own heartbreak:

Tuiten's drugs come at arousal in two ways--a testosterone coating helps the body produce dopamine, creating a rush of lust. A delayed-release tablet left when the coating wears off works desire from another angle: Lybrido increases genital blood flow, much like Viagra, while Lybridos works by suppressing serotonin, a calming molecule that fosters self-control, and in the short term, pushing the body's balance of serotonin/dopamine in favor of the latter.

Lybrido has gone through a few smaller-stage trials, and early results for both drugs are looking positive. Tuiten hopes to get F.D.A. approval for larger trials, and pending success, the drug could hit the market by 2016.

Though Lybrido isn't the first drug to be developed with the hopes of helping women boost their sex drive, previous attempts have been largely unsuccessful. FDA trials of LibiGel, a testosterone gel that could be applied to the skin, failed to create any more sexual interest in women than a placebo. Another drug, Bremelanotide, had some success in putting passion back in the sex lives of women who were plagued by sexual disinterest, but also came with nasty side effects like vomiting and sudden blood pressure increases.

The existence of so many women who struggle to retain their sex drive in long-term relationships challenges widely held beliefs about female sexuality: namely, that women are hard-wired for commitment. The women Bergner interviews are, for the most part, in love with their partners and attracted, but for whatever reason, feel "sexually deadened." One wonders "Am I going to get my freak back?" Despite the evolutionary psychology theory that women have evolved to look for steady, monogamous partners to care for them and their offspring, studies on women's desire for casual sex have shown that women respond better to novel sexual stimuli--like pornography viewed for the first time, rather than repeatedly, or a photo of a handsome stranger.

Development of female arousal drugs also seems to be hampered by the fear that a pharmacological way to induce desire might create a society of raging nymphomaniacs, according to Bergner. Even as they work to ramp up female desire, researchers worry that they might create a brave new world of sexually aggressive women, he writes: "Companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering."

In other words, a pill that works too well to create female arousal might create mass hysteria and THE END OF THE WORLD. Or perhaps it would just add an extra complication to the already complicated world of relationships.

As Bergner puts it:

Head over to The New York Times for the full story, and some great photo illustrations.

Brazil has a big couple of years coming up: the FIFA World Cup and the pope are both coming to Brazil in 2014, and the summer 2016 Olympic Games will be held in Rio. To ensure the safety of those attending those events, Brazil has brought in the big guns: robots.

The Brazilian government has contracted iRobot, makers of both circular vacuum-bots like the Roomba and military/rescue tools, to provide iRobot 510 PackBots for the preparation of these events. The 510 PackBot will be used during the construction of the Olympic stadia, to make sure no explosives are being planted during this messy phase, and also to clear routes. It's not a dissimilar job from what the 510 PackBot does in the military--and over 5,000 of them have been deployed worldwide, for military purposes. They're even used by the US military in Afghanistan.

Brazil contracted iRobot to provide $7.2 million worth of 510 PackBots. The PackBot uses a remote controller, not unlike a videogame controller, and its base model is weatherproof and capable of withstanding a six-foot drop (and righting itself, if it lands upside-down). But it can also be equipped with all kinds of sensors and gadgetry, from high-def cameras to bomb-defusing devices to explosive detection sensors to a hazardous materials sensor that can collect and identify samples from the air.

It's not totally clear what Brazil intends to do with the PackBots, though it's safe to assume reconnaissance. They should arrive this year, to prepare for next year's events. Read more over at CNET.

Do you have a special talent for reading scribbled handwriting and an interest in looking at dead bugs?

Rather than setting a handful of bleary-eyed undergrads with the task of transcribing hand-written field notes that correspond with its more than a million insect specimens, Calbug, a consortium of nine major entomological collections from across California, is opening the project up to the public, asking citizen scientists to help convert the records into an electronic form so they can be made available worldwide.

Led by the University of California, Berkeley's Essig Museum of Entomology, the crowd-sourced transcription project will digitize field notes and records that correspond to insect specimens in their collections, some of which are more than 100 years old.

The bug-enthused can catch an inside glimpse at huge sections of the museum collections, while helping make those records more accessible to people around the world. Calbug is part of Notes From Nature a larger natural history transcription project from Zooniverse that also includes Herbararium, a project to transcribe plant records from the southeast U.S.

Zooniverse already has already enlisted citizen scientists' to help identify objects on the sea floor, classify new planets and find gravitational lenses.

"Without the help of citizen scientists, processing the sheer volume of records held in natural history collections - estimated to be well over 2 billion worldwide - would take generations," Essig Museum director Rosemary Gillespie said in a press statement.

Calbug's first 20,000 images came online at the end of April as part of Notes From Nature's beta launch, and 38 percent have now been catalogued by a total of 2,144 people. Herbararium's collection is currently 26 percent transcribed.

"Along the way, you will be possibly be finding species that have never been observed anywhere else!" the Notes From Nature website adds.

Add your own efforts to the mix here.

[UC Berkeley News Center]

When NASA sends a rocket out to tow an asteroid into Earth orbit, it'll be ion propelled.

Ion propulsion engines harness magnetic fields to create thrust, instead of depending on chemical explosions the way chemically fueled engines do. NASA engineers are developing such an engine for the agency's plans to bring an asteroid into Earth's orbit and then send astronauts there to study it. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden went to see a prototype engine yesterday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the Associated Press reported.

Bolden also praised the bring-it-to-us asteroid study plan. Originally, the Obama Administration wanted to send people to the asteroid belt, but bringing an asteroid here instead will be cheaper. The technologies the Asteroid Retrieval Initiative develops will help NASA shuttle people to Mars in the future, Bolden told the Pasadena Sun.

Ion thrusters are more fuel efficient and last longer than chemical engines, characteristics the U.S.' asteroid-hauling rocket will need, John Brophy, an electric propulsion engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Pasadena Sun. NASA began researching the technology in the 1950s and first used it in a spacecraft in 2001.

The Asteroid Retrieval Initiative will cost an estimated $2.6 billion. It should have people on an asteroid in six to 10 years. The project's leaders are looking to bring in an asteroid that's 20 to 25 feet in diameter-something that would burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in the event that it strays too close to home.

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In the future, we'll take self-driving cars to cookouts, raise a glass to the robots fighting wars abroad (or, okay, to their remote human operators), and drink cocktails made by robots.

Wait, what? Robot bartenders! They're everywhere! Here, I've assembled 11 of the most intriguing autonomous machines involved in serving alcohol. Some are test models, others are hobbyist creations, and at least one is a successful crowdfunded project (yes, people are willing to pay for a bartender who doesn't sneer when you order a Malibu bay breeze--so I like fruity drinks, so the hell what?). Check out the gallery for a peek at tomorrow's most talented bartenders.

It's been a rough week for bridges around the U.S. At about 7 p.m. local time in Washington state yesterday a bridge spanning the Skagit river north of Seattle (part of Interstate 5) collapsed after a truck carrying a tall load collided with one of the spans, sending two cars plunging into the river below. The three people in those cars all survived with non-life-threatening injuries, but it should probably come as a surprise to no one that the bridge--which services about 71,000 crossings of the Skagit river every day--is rated "functionally obsolete" by the Federal Highway administration.

As noted above, the collapse didn't happen purely due to the poor state of the bridge. A tractor-trailer carrying an overly tall load struck one of the overhead supports on the bridge as it crossed, precipitating the collapse. That doesn't sound like something that should happen, but the author acknowledges that he is not a civil engineer and does not understand all the nuances of bridge building.

Although to really understand this particular collapse one would need to be a civil engineer circa 1955, which is when this particular span of I-5 was constructed. The rating of "functionally obsolete" doesn't mean that this bridge was structurally deficient, but that its design is outdated, particularly in some specific ways. For instance, its shoulders were too narrow. And perhaps more importantly, its overhead clearance was too low.

In a November 2012 inspection it scored 47 out of 100 on a sufficiency rating. And it's not alone. A quarter of Washington state's 7,840 bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. And lest you be shaking your head wondering how the bureaucrats in Washington state ever let it come to this, be advised: If you're currently in the U.S., your state likely isn't doing much better. Collectively America holds a D+ rating on its infrastructure report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers (who actually are civil engineers). Those engineers estimate we need $3.6 trillion in investment by 2020 to shore up our crumbling infrastructure (there are a few ways to do this, like this and this). No big deal.

In other, more video-friendly infrastructure news, this 300-yard wooden railway bridge caught fire and collapsed in Lampasas County, Texas, (that's just northwest of Austin) earlier this week. Firefighters were on the scene for 15 hours trying to save it this rail link spanning the Colorado river before it succumbed to the fire damage. This bridge--which was built in 1910 and still handles regular railway freight--didn't collapse from infrastructure deficiencies (that we know of). But it did collapse spectacularly.

[Fox News]

Google has acquired a Bay Area technology company that generates power through wind turbines attached to robotic kites. The news comes just a couple weeks after the company, Makani Power, completed the first fully autonomous flight of a kite power system.

How flying generators work: the kite flies in a circle, off nothing more than lift and wind, and uses that motion to push air over its propellers, which in turn generate electricity. The energy is then transmitted down a tether attached to a landing station, dubbed the "spar buoy." Makani claims that the system generates more energy than conventional turbines and costs less to build.

Why is Google interested? Google uses a tremendous amount of electricity, and has copped to being a little embarrased by how much fossil fuel it uses. Google actively seeks out renewable energy, and has invested in wind farms before. Efficient, futuristic renewable energy harvested by flying robots? Ideal.

Astronomers love to point their telescopes at the Ring Nebula. Located 2,000 light years away in the constellation Lyra, this ring of glowing gas has a distinctive elliptical shape when seen from Earth. But new images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the nebula actually looks a lot more like a football or a misshapen doughnut.

Scientists now believe that the blue and green gaseous material at the center of the ring is a large football-shaped region sheathed by a ring of cooler gas (the yellow and orange ring) at its fattest point near the center. So the ends of the hotter football-shaped gas cloud protrude from either end of the ring, and we're looking directly at the end of the football, so we see the enveloping cooler gas as a ring encircling the hotter blue/green gas.

What does all that mean? If you're an astronomer it means you have a better understanding of the Ring Nebula. That in turn provides insight into the way our own sun's nebula will form in another six billion years or so when it runs out of fuel, sheds its outer gasses, and collapses in on itself (it won't look like this because our sun isn't as big, but nonetheless there will be similarities). For the rest of us, it means look at that amazing image of the Ring Nebula!

[NASA]

TechCrunch has a nice look at a new API from Lambda Labs, an "early-stage startup" (meaning, brand-new) from San Francisco, that's causing a bit of consternation. Lambda Labs makes a facial recognition API, which you can actually try out here in your browser. But now Lambda has released a version of that API specifically for Google Glass.

There are certain software restrictions that hold back what the hardware can do--in this case, you can't use the facial recognition API to get a real-time identification. Instead, you have to take a picture, send it to the app's developers for it to be analyzed, and then receive the ID. That doesn't take long, but it's not exactly a Robocop-level ID system.

But the Glass hardware is capable of that kind of real-time information flow, to a degree. Glass isn't an augmented reality system; it's more like a tiny notifications screen in the corner of your field of view. You won't see a face with a name under it, but you might see a face, then tilt your eyes up and to the left and see text with an ID on it.

The bigger and perhaps more interesting issue here is whether this will fly with Google and the US government. In a New York Times article, Steve Lee, director of project management for Google Glass, said: "We've consistently said that we won't add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place." And then there's the inquiry from eight members of Congress about Google Glass's potential privacy implications.

I've written about how Google Glass isn't a surveillance device, but this is something a little bit different: the debate here is all fine lines and shades of gray. The API already exists, the technology is common, and the hardware is out there. Does it really matter if you're performing this action with a smartphone or Google Glass? Can you ethically stop someone from accessing previously-accessible data just because it's in a slightly different form? It's a nuanced and complex question, one we don't have an answer to--but one that Google and lawmakers will have to address.

[via TechCrunch]

File this under something you don't see every day. The total projected price for the Pentagon's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program--the most expensive weapons development program in history--has dropped. Though its program history is riddled with cost and schedule overruns alongside unforeseen engineering and design issues, the total price tag for the JSF fell $4.5 billion in 2012, the first time in the program's history that the projected cost has gone anywhere but up (and up and up).

The cost savings come from the Pentagon's annual selected acquisitions report (SAR), which reviewed 78 DoD programs and found that to absolutely no one's surprise the overall cost of Pentagon acquisition programs grew by nearly $40 billion (or 2.44 percent) on the whole last year. But it seems all the talk of federal belt-tightening might be having an impact on Pentagon culture. This was also the first time in a long time that no program in the SAR went 15 percent or more over its budget.

Pentagon officials credited the Better Buying Power initiative, an in-house effort to reform weapons procurement to better allocate resources and reduce redundant or wasteful spending, with helping to curb spending on several programs.

For a program with such a checkered past--it's been considered for the budgetary chopping block more than once--the drop in overall cost is huge for the JSF program and an indicator that it may finally be moving toward initial operating capability. Often a program finds a way to spend the money it already has in its projections, so the downward revision in total price may amount to something the JSF program really needed: a public relations boost at a point when pricey government programs are not popular with anyone.

So not only is the JSF the most expensive weapon ever developed, but it might now hold the title--at $4.5 billion--for the most expensive PR moment ever purchased.

[Defense News]

So you're about to order a bottle of tasty white wine! Do you want dry, very dry, or off-dry? And what ratio of melon-ness to butterscotch-ness do you want? What about saltiness? Stonefruit-ness? If you don't know, your waiter will look at you through eyes swollen with pity; your date will excuse him/herself and climb for freedom through a bathroom window; you will be left alone, with only a middling bottle by your side, a laughable semblance of comfort.

This infographic can help!

Graphic designer Sean Seidell, who previously made this equally delicious infographic overview of chocolate flavors, aggregated wine reviews from sites like Wine Spectator to organize 20 different types of wine. The wines are arranged by 20 different flavors, like "honey" and "herbal," then more generally by five categories: very dry, dry, off-dry, semi-sweet, and sweet. Dryness or sweetness, of course, is as much a result of the winemaker's technique as it is of the source grape varietal, but the chart shows the characteristics of each varietal's most popular style.

"One of the things I enjoyed most about this project was researching a wine and then going out to purchase a bottle of that wine," Seidell wrote in an email to Popular Science. "First I would try the wine without looking at my notes and try to sort out the flavors. I'd come up with maybe four flavors at most on my own. Then I would look at my research notes and keep those flavors in mind as I took another sip. Sauvignon Blanc, for example, had what appeared to be an impossible number of flavors, but as I drank it I found that it really did contain what my research said it did: Very Dry with lots of Citrus, Acid, Melon, and Stonefruit flavors alongside lighter Honey, Floral, Creamy, and Mineral flavors."

You'll know exactly what you want for a nice drink. (Or to get trashed on. Whichever.)

5.3 million: the number of Lego bricks used to build the world's largest Lego model, a life-size X-wing fighter complete with Lego Luke Skywalker

40,000: the planned population for Masdar City, a solar-powered eco-metropolis in the middle of the Arabian desert and the world's most ambitious eco-city

15 days: the time it took the journal Cell to accept and publish last week's study on the first cloned human embryo. An anonymous online commenter has now pointed out four potential errors in the paper.

20,000 feet: the height of the ash plume created by the recent eruption of Alaska's Pavlof volcano

2016: the year a "female Viagra," called Lybrido, could hit the market in the U.S.

$390: the price to book a room in Barcelona's futuristic space hotel, which sits atop an artificial island and features a zero-gravity spa, a vertical wind tunnel, and a marina for parking yachts

16: the number of tiger genomes that scientists sequenced in order to discover the single genetic mutation responsible for all white tigers

40 minutes: the time this week's deadly Moore, Okla., tornado was on the ground. See a reconstruction of the twister from start to finish, in videos, as well as satellite images of the disaster.

16 minutes: the warning time residents received before the deadly tornado touched down in Newcastle, Okla. Why are tornados so hard to predict?

-15 degrees Celsius: the coldest temperature at which bacteria have ever been discovered to thrive. Researchers recently found these cold-resistant microbes in the Canadian Arctic-which is great news for life on Mars.

$25: the cost of a newer, stronger 3-D printed pistol created by a Wisconsin engineer

1987: the year a German scientist showed that itching wasn't just a less intense form of pain. Now, researchers have at long last identified the molecule responsible for itchiness.

80 minutes: the length of the first test flight of the U.S. Navy's game-changing MQ-4C Triton spy drone, which can detect and identify a ship from 2,000 nautical miles away and 10 miles above sea level

$249: the price of a video game headset that will zap your brain to improve your gaming ability

30 years: the shelf-life of the "ink" cartridges for NASA's new 3-D printer that can print food from insects and plants

1/10,000 of a second: the speed at which the jaws of a trap-jaw ant can snap shut on prey (see a parasite-infected trap-jaw ant below)

25 percent: the reduction in Ireland's population after the mid-19th-century potato blight. Scientists have finally revealed the specific pathogen responsible for the famine.

2 months: the time it took to build this booze-infused game of Battleship (please sink responsibly)

$1.1 billion: the amount a giant carnivorous plant spent to acquire Tumblr this week

23: the number of infants involved in the small study that sparked the "crack baby" epidemic scare of the 1980s (which turned out to be totally bogus)

50 years: the length of time the U.S. Navy has employed dolphins to search for mines (the hard-working marine mammals recently discovered something really, really cool)

22.22 miles: the distance the Mars rover Opportunity has traveled on Mars, the longest distance a NASA vehicle has ever driven on another planet

$2.6 billion: the cost of a NASA initiative to lasso and asteroid and bring it back to Earth's orbit (NASA Administrator Charles Bolden this week inspected a prototype ion propulsion engine for the mission)

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The modern garage first appeared in the 1920s, and inventors-of automobile parts, among other things-began to occupy them almost immediately. Walt and Roy Disney started making cartoons in a Hollywood garage in 1923; eight years later, an engineer named Gerhard Fisher started building his Metallascope metal detectors in a garage in Palo Alto, California; and in 1938, William Hewlett and David Packard rented their own garage space in Palo Alto. The Hewlett-Packard garage would become the most famous in the history of American entrepreneurship. In 1989, it was designated the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley," an official state landmark.

Still, the archetype of the "garage inventor"-and indeed the phrase itself-did not catch on until the 1960s and '70s. "The attached garage is really a postwar thing," says Eric Hintz, a historian at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian. He says that the structure gave moonlighting engineers in the developing suburbs a large, configurable space, where they might set up their tables and sawhorses.
Garage-style inventors predate the existence of garages, however. Before the 1920s, a part-time inventor might have dreamed up ideas inside the carriage house, which housed a family's horse and buggy. In 1885, for example, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, set up a lab inside the carriage house behind his father's home in Washington, D.C.

These days, the garage has more symbolic meaning than utility. When Jeff Bezos was building Amazon in the early 1990s, he chose to rent a house in the suburbs of Seattle in place of a more conventional office space-he wanted to say that he'd started out in a garage. "Even if it is a construct, it works," Hintz says. "It's sort of a shorthand. It's very romantic to say, ‘Here's the garage.' You can build a whole corporate culture around it."

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

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.