In space, where delivery of items you might need is difficult and square footage is at a premium, 3-D printing seems like a no-brainer. Don't fly up what you need--print it right there! So it's great that NASA has officially contracted a semi-in-house company, Made in Space, to build a zero-gravity 3-D printer for use off-world.

Made in Space was founded in 2010 at NASA Ames by a bunch of 3-D printing veterans and entrepreneurs, with the express aim of launching a 3-D printer into space. It's not an easy proposition, though; terrestrial 3-D printers like the Makerbot, which seems about the same size as the prototypes Made in Space is working with, uses Earth's gravity to drip lines of plastic into its shapes.

Made in Space's stated goals include:

• Provide valuable scientific foundation for future additive manufacturing in space.
• Demonstrate the long-term effects of microgravity on 3D printing.
• Demonstrate the end-to-end use case of a 3D printer in the microgravity environment by building useful components.

3-D printing could be a key tool in space; you never know exactly what you'll need, and it's ridiculously expensive, difficult, and time-consuming to fly up tools or spare parts to the International Space Station or elsewhere. And Made in Space, among others (like Enrico Dini of D-Shape), is also researching the possibility of using materials that are found in space, like moon dust, as the key base material in 3-D printing. Eventually 3-D printers might even be used to print anything from satellites to houses.

Read more over at Made in Space's page.

Drawing inspiration from a brain scan taken as part of a research study, artist Laura Jacobson made a series of weird, wonderful works installed now at Stanford's Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging.

Through acrylics, sculpture, and etchings, Jacobson reinterprets the MRI. In one piece, an etching of neurons looks like a landscape painting of a tree on a yellow background (above). For the pieces titled "Resonance Punctuated," Jacobson grabbed circuit boards, plumbing fixtures, and other detritus, adding all of it to where the gray matter should be.

The etching "Position" takes cues from scans of the hippocampus and nerve fibers, as well as Stanford campus topography and architecture.

The acrylic "Acquisition," a diptych, alludes to both red blood cells and chemical structures. It's hard to look at the work on the left and not see the long tunnel of an MRI machine, too.

If you're in the Stanford campus area, you can check out Jacobson's series at the imaging center in the Department of Psychology.

A new study, published today, is a first step toward a drug to prevent PTSD in people-something soldiers or emergency responders could take just before or after undergoing something traumatic.

Like many preliminary studies, this drug was tested in mice. It found that a new, fairly untested chemical prevents post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms in mice, if researchers give the mice the drug soon before or after a traumatic event. For this study, traumatizing mice meant strapping them onto a wooden board so they can't move for two hours. (Although there are robots specially designed to terrorize rodents.)

The study also opened a few new windows into the science of PTSD. It found a gene that makes both mice and people with PTSD react differently to scary sounds. Because the gene controls something in the part of the brain that processes fear, it suggested a mechanism for how PTSD arises. And it suggested that a new, non-addictive class of drugs may help with PTSD. Previously, researchers had found that giving people morphine soon after trauma helps prevent PTSD.

The PTSD-prevention drug is called SR-8993. It sticks to receptors in the brain that, in mice, seems to help them learn to fear. Abnormal fear learning is an important symptom of PTSD. People with PTSD have a hard time distinguishing when they're in safe or dangerous situations, for example.

The scientists, a team of chemists and psychiatrists from all over the U.S., found something similar in their mice. Six days after getting strapped to a board, the mice were bad at learning when they would get a mild shock in the foot and when they were safe from shocks. They seemed to be afraid of getting shocked all the time. Non-traumatized mice, on the other hand, are able to learn when they shouldn't worry.

When scientists gave mice an injection of SR-8993 into the brain, however, the mice didn't learn to fear shocks. The injections worked for both trauma-exposed and normal mice.

The scientists also studied the gene that makes the brain receptor to which SR-8993 sticks. Mice and people both have their own versions of the gene, called Oprl1. Previous studies had found that in people, altered versions of Oprl1 are associated with a higher risk of getting PTSD after trauma. In this study, the traumatized mice made more Oprl1 than their non-traumatized neighbors. So the study showed that Oprl1 might be important to PTSD, fear learning and the amygdala-a small part of the brain where there are a lot of Oprl1 receptors, which don't appear abundantly anywhere else.

This work is just an early look into PTSD prevention. It's important to remember that studies in mice always take a long time to wend their way to human studies and eventually to Food and Drug Administration approval. (That's not necessarily a bad thing. You want this process to be thorough.) Many drugs that work in mice don't actually cut it once scientists try them in humans. This might be especially true for psychiatric drugs tested in mice. PTSD and other mental illnesses are complex and poorly understood. It's difficult to give a lab mouse a human mental illness-or even to know when you've succeeded in doing just that.

The U.S. team published their SR-8993 study today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Last fall, David Atkinson and a team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced that they had "sniffed" certain explosives in ambient air for the first time. Most common explosives-RDX, PETN, blasting gels-exist in very low ambient concentrations, often in the parts-per-quadrillion range. Existing detectors are not that sensitive, meaning security forces need to test suspects directly, as in airports. A version of Atkinson's machine could simply sniff targets, speeding the process. "It could change the way we do screening for explosive threats," he says.

Scientists spike a glass slide with residue from a few known explosives. A vacuum pump within the detector sucks air through a one-inch wide opening at a rate of between one and five liters per minute.

The vapor passes through a copper tube toward an ionization source. Nitrate ions, which have a high charge affinity, collide with the highly polar explosive molecules, so they tend to stick together, forming an adduct-or cluster molecule.

To ensure that many of the explosive molecules in the airstream are ionized, Atkinson's team used a long, copper reaction tube to extend the reaction period to approximately two seconds.

Electric fields on the front of the commercial mass spectrometer guide the charged ions through a 600-micron-wide passage into the mass spectrometer itself.

The mass spectrometer analyzes the sample and determines the molecular weight. Currently, Atkinson's team can detect at least nine explosives, including PETN, RDX, C-4, Semtex, smokeless powder, and some blasting gels.

Amid chants of "Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!, the Science Guy himself logged on to Reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about science, his childhood, his favorite experiments, and a human mission to Mars. Despite a weird Gillette plug in his opening post, Bill Nye's latest AMA turned out to be just as fun as the one he hosted last year.

Here are our eight favorite questions and answers.

1. Bill Nye's life was changed by bees.

User MuddIsland asks, "Mr. Nye is there any interesting event from your childhood, teens, or even adult life that you would be willing to share? If so what is it and how did it affect your life?"

Nye responds:

2. Bill Nye sometimes gets science facts wrong.

After Nye's poetic description of bumble bee anatomy, user jhartsho very hesitantly offers a correction:

3. Bill Nye has a favorite science experiment.

User crow6671 asks, "Thank you for doing this iAmA. You rock!! Here's my question, what is one of your favorite experiments to do?"

Nye's got it covered:

4. Bill Nye can't pick a favorite scientific theorem.

User TheSillyLion asks, "What is your favorite scientific theorem or equation? (Example: theory of relativity, Hubble parameter, E=mc2)"

Nye puts it in perspective:

5. Bill Nye won't discount the idea of life on Mars.

User Jamiefox92 asks, "Do you think that we could have a manned mission to Mars in our lifetime with all the factors such as time from Earth to Mars and with the amount of solar radiation that the men would face during the trip?"

Nye dreams of Martians:

6. Bill Nye can explain dark matter in one sentence.

User DrXaverius asks, "Can you explain dark matter in layman's terms?"

Yes, Nye can:

7. Bill Nye never gets bored.

User cloudclad asks, "What field of science bores you the most?"

Nye is polite but firm:

8. Bill Nye isn't in it for the money.

User MuscleMansMom asks, "Hi Mr. Nye! What made you chose doing stuff like kid shows as opposed to working solely in a lab?"

Nye believes in the scientist in everyone:

Gentlemen: if you're running low on fuel after a poor night's sleep, but think your luck's improving because a woman is totally flirting with you right now, think again, because your dumb, REM-deprived brain is very possibly playing tricks on you. In a recent study, researchers found that men who'd missed out on just one night's sleep rated women as significantly more interested in sex than usual.

In the study, a team of researchers took 60 college students (31 men, 29 women) and had them complete a survey to determine perceived intent/interest in both sex and commitment, before and after a night of sleep deprivation. (Sample question: "When a woman goes out to a bar, how likely is it that she is interested in finding someone to have sex with that night?")

When the group answered the survey questions while well-rested, both the men and the women rated men's interest in sex as considerably lower than women's. But after a night of sleep deprivation, the men in the group rated women's interest--that is, women as an entire gender--as considerably higher. In fact, it was about the same as their rating for men's interest. The women, meanwhile, didn't change their answers, even after losing the night's sleep. The bad night's sleep also didn't have any effect on how either gender judged interest in commitment.

The researchers note that sleep deprivation has been shown to affect the decision-making parts of the brain in the same way getting drunk does, and this could be a manifestation of that. It's a pretty small study, and only asked college students, so isn't definitive or anything. But just to be safe, dudes: count how many hours of sleep you got before you ask for a phone number.

An ordinance before the city council of Iowa City, Iowa, would prohibit automated machines from issuing tickets without a human police officer present. Last night, the bill passed the first of three steps needed to become law.

The ordinance got its start as a petition against red light cameras, which automatically record the license plates of cars driving through red lights and then send fines to the car owner. Red light cameras have flaws: They can't check the license of the driver, and sometimes they catch legal right turns on red as well. Studies on the effectiveness of red light cameras in reducing accidents are tepidly in favor. But safety concerns aren't really the main objection people have to red light cameras.

Really, it's about fear of robots.

The Iowa City ordinance would also prohibit law enforcement from using license plate-reading devices, or any domestic drone system, to enforce traffic law violations, unless there is an officer present. This would end red light cameras, which work by monitoring intersections continuously and automatically mailing fines to violators.

License plate readers work similarly, and can be integrated into a system where they detect and fine "scofflaws," as this licence plate-reading device manufacturer advertises. Drones, at least ones used to enforce parking violations, would end up much like police dogs, as an extra sensing platform brought out for specific reasons, rather than an ambient and autonomous apparatus on patrol.

Automation is the greatest promise of these robots, and the proposed ban strikes an interesting line between public safety and privacy. Excepting false positives, red light cameras don't punish undeserving people. They very specifically catch a crime, one that lends itself to automation. Making it so only human officers can issue fines for this crime feels like a step backward.

License plate-reading devices are less about public safety and more about public order. When used for parking enforcement, they catch people who skirt fees or miss payments, fine them, and then store that data as potential evidence in case of disputes. This is clearly a privacy issue, but it's also the same thing a parking lot attendant could do with a camera and a notebook. Banning automation just reduces the number of violators who will be caught.

[Ars Technica]

Dow Jones, examining data from 2007 to 2012, created this infographic on how media coverage of clean energy deals and actual clean energy deals intersect.

The data's culled from a worldwide English-language news archive and the company's own database of VC deals, leading to this breakdown: the proportion of news articles on different kinds of projects versus how much venture capital funding those same projects got. So 33 percent of the news articles mentioned electricity generation--wind power, solar power, etc.--while just 27 percent of VC funding went to those projects. Sixteen percent of articles mentioned water conversation projects, and only 7 percent of VC money went there.

What you get out of those statistics depends on your view of how the media works, and should work. The infographic seems to imply that it is a problem that the two sets of data don't match up more closely ("Does the buzz match the bounty?" it asks). That's debatable. Media organizations aren't auditing themselves to see how close they're coming to VC deals. With that in mind, you might be surprised how close the two sets of data actually are. We also don't know, for example, what percentage of those news articles reflected negative versus positive coverage--it all gets lumped in under "buzz" here.

You're probably already used to getting great GPS coverage in many of the places you visit. Now get ready for GPS in space. NASA is working to build a navigation system that would work anywhere in our solar system and beyond, IEEE Spectrum reported.

Spacecraft now depend mostly on radio signals sent from Earth to navigate, as Spectrum explains. As craft get further away from Earth, however, that method becomes less accurate. So NASA is looking to use signals from neutron stars-super dense, super high-energy stars at the end of their lifetimes-to locate ships in deeper space.

Certain neutron stars, called pulsars, emit powerful beams of light while spinning rapidly. NASA compares pulsar light to lighthouse beams. Their movement is extremely regular, so a spacecraft detecting those beams will know exactly where each beam is expected to be in space at any given time, and thus calculate where it is in space, too. Pulsar beams are detectable in "every conceivable" point in space where people might want to fly in the future, Ken Gendreau, the lead scientist in the project, said in a statement.

Gendreau and his team plan to test the system in a machine they'll send to the International Space Station in 2017. The mission is called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or NICER/SEXTANT.

NICER/SEXTANT's instruments will also teach astronomers more about neutron stars. Massive stars turn into neutron stars when they run through the nuclear reaction that fuels them, explode, and then collapse. Neutron stars produce intense magnetic and electric fields and pack matter in the densest manner possible. There's no way to recreate their conditions on Earth to study them.

A teaspoon of neutron star matter placed on Earth would weigh a billion tons, according to NASA. If they were any denser, they'd become black holes.

[IEEE Spectrum, NASA]

Apparently, the good ol' days really did shine brighter, at least for drug development. In decades past, clinical trials found that drugs were hugely effective, compared to placebo, a new study reveals. Newer drugs, on the other hand, are often only just slightly better than placebo, Reuters reported. The study looked at drugs of all types, treating everything from infections to mental illness to cancer.

This is a strange phenomenon, but one that conforms to how many doctors feel. Over the past few years, there's been a lotoftalk about the increasing costs, but decreasing effectiveness, of the pharmaceutical industry. Effectiveness-over-placebo is just another way of measuring that decline.

As new studies confirm the trend, new drugs may find themselves in trouble with U.S. healthcare reform, Reuters reported. The Affordable Care Act emphasizes comparing treatments. Newer drugs, with their subtler effects, may lose out.

So why is this happening? Some posit that the problem is not as bad as it seems; it may be that the people who volunteer for clinical trials have changed, for example. Many clinical trials now treat those who haven't responded to anything else, so their cases are naturally more difficult. Clinical trials may also be more carefully run now than they were in 1966, the earliest trials the new study examined. More careful trials likely find less dramatic effects for drugs.

Nevertheless, the problem is real, Mark Olfson, one of the researchers who conducted the new study, told Reuters. And how to fix it will have to be an entirely differently study.

[Reuters]

A team of researchers at the University of Florida has solved the mystery of what some call "one of the most puzzling events in evolution": the reduction and loss of the penis in most male birds.

About 10,000 species of birds have reduced or absent external genitalia as adults. Many have normal penises as embryos, but as they develop, their penises stop growing and shrink away. (Despite that, male birds still manage to fertilize female birds through internal insemination, just like humans. We'll get to how in a moment.)

To study how male birds lose their penises, the UF researchers examined the embryonic development of birds with penises (ducks and emus) and birds without penises (chicks), among other creatures.

What they found was that a critical gene called Bmp4 switches on, causing developing genitals to wither away. In other birds like ducks and emus, that gene stays switched off, allowing their penises to grow fully. (In some birds, they grow a little too fully: certain species of water fowl, like ducks, have such large phalluses, they can exceed the length of the body.)

"Our discovery shows that reduction of the penis during bird evolution occurred by activation of a normal mechanism that attenuates development-programmed cell death-in a new location, the tip of the emerging penis," says Martin Cohn, a professor at UF's Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a senior author on the study.

Cohn and his colleagues believe their research could shed light on evolutionary developments beyond the fowl world. It could "lead to discoveries of new mechanisms of embryonic development, some of which will be totally unexpected," Cohn says. "This allows us to understand not only how evolution works, but also to gain new insights into possible causes of malformations."

Birds have clearly figured out how to make do, given that they've have had no trouble replenishing the flock. Chickens perform what is called the cloacal kiss, in which the male and female must cooperate in order to transfer sperm between their opposing cloacae.

But that still leaves the question as to what evolutionary function a missing penis could possibly have.

Says Ana Herrera, UF graduate student and lead author on the study: "One idea is that choosing to mate with males who have a reduced or absent penis confers some advantage to females by giving them control over copulation and the paternity of their offspring."

Their findings will be published in this week's journal Current Biology.

Five years ago, DARPA challenged researchers to create a vacuum system smaller than a cubic centimeter and powered by just a quarter-Watt of energy. This week, DARPA announced the program's success. Researchers at University of Michigan, MIT, and Honeywell International have each demonstrated penny-sized micromachines that pave the way for scaled-down chemical sensors.

When the project started in 2008, the goal was to create a smaller chemical sensor, useful for detecting chemical weapons. Mass spectrometers are devices that identify chemicals by using vacuums to measuring their mass. Because the device only needs to measure a few molecules, these vacuum chambers can be incredibly small. Due to technology limitations, mass spectrometers have been using vacuums chambers much larger than necessary.

Pictured above is one of the devices that solves this problem. The model, from the University of Michigan, features hexagonal chambers and a connecting series of pumps and valves.

Now that the tiny vacuums exist, it will be fascinating to see where they turn up. The original goal of a chemical detector fits with DARPA's military focus: a mass spectrometer built around these new vacuums could fit on a micro-drone, creating a hard-to-detect and easy-to-maneuver craft designed to sniff out chemical weapons.

Another possibility, once the technology becomes cheap enough, will be incorporation into consumer electronics. DARPA programmer Andrei Shkel anticipates better atomic clocks, which need vacuums to function. Personally, I'm interested in the generation of smartphone that can sniff restaurant food for suspicious compounds.

A team of scientists working at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii has solved one of the vital inconsistencies in the Big Bang theory, reconciling observed data with our current theoretical models of how the birth of the universe went down 13.8 billion years ago. The discovery was published in the June 6 edition of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Though widely accept in the scientific community, the Big Bang theory still has some kinks. One of the greatest discrepancies between the model and our actual observations of the universe involves the presence of lithium isotopes.

Light elements like helium, deuterium and lithium formed in the first hot moments of the universe's existence, according to a theory called Big Bang nucleosynthesis, but from what we could tell, the actual levels of lithium in the in the universe were much different than the model would suggest. From looking at the oldest stars in our galaxy, it seemed that there was about 200 times more of the isotope Lithium-6 than Big Bang nucleosynthesis accounted for, and up to five times less of Lithium-7.

But according to Karin Lind of the University of Cambridge, that data was somewhat inaccurate. Li-6 is a difficult isotope to detect, as it has a fairly weak signature. A 2004 upgrade to a spectograph at the Keck Observatory, which houses two of the largest telescopes in the world, allowed Lind and her team to see it in finer detail than had been possible previously. They discovered that the lower quality observation, along with some simplifications in analysis, led to a false reading of lithium levels in earlier data.

"Using more sophisticated physics and powerful super-computers, we managed to remove the systematic biases that plague traditional modeling and have previously led to false identifications of the 6Li/7Li isotopic signature," Lind says in a statement. The team's observations of lithium levels were more in line with the Big Bang theory's predictions.

"Our findings remove much of the stark tension between 6Li and 7Li abundances in stars and standard BBN, even opening up the door for a full reconciliation," Lind explains.

Electrical engineers at Purdue University have found a way to make your data disappear completely--into holes in time. The technique, described in a paper published online in Nature yesterday, uses pulses of light to create "time holes" that allow communication across optic fibers to disappear completely.

The idea of a data cloak, a way to hide the transfer of data in "time pockets," has existed for a few years, but until now the effect didn't last long and wasn't consistent enough to be of any practical use. This is the first temporal cloak that can work quickly enough to hide data streams in telecommunications systems. It can work to hide up to 46 percent of the window of time it takes to transfer data (one of the first temporal cloaking techniques worked less than one percent of the time, according to a Purdue release).

This cloak works using a wave phenomenon called the Talbot effect. Manipulating the timing of light pulses so that the crest of one light wave interacts with the trough of another creates a zero light intensity--where the two signals cancel each other out--in which data can be hidden.

Right now, author Joseph Lukens, a Purdue graduate student, says the cloaking effect is almost too efficient. "We erased the data-adding event entirely from history, so there's no way that data could be sent as a useful message to anyone, even a genuine recipient," he told Nature. Future tweaking might solve this problem to allow super-secret messages to pass through undetected and still make it to the intended recipient. But maybe they can use the current version to destroy embarrassing emails mid-send?

[Nature]

For the past three months, Verizon has handed over information on all telephone calls within its system to the U.S. government. This news, which broke last night thanks to a leaked court document, is a big story, but it isn't exactly a surprising one.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group dedicated to the protection of fundamental rights online, has long suspected this kind of broad surveillance. Last summer, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), hinted that the government has broader surveillance powers than people suspect. The agencies doing the surveillance all fall under the executive branch, but congress has the power of oversight. Last December, Congress voted to extend the act granting this broad surveillance power until at least 2017.

What that all means: While the actual Verizon surveillance story is news, it's hardly unanticipated, and it falls into a much larger pattern of increased governmental surveillance powers post-9/11.

It also means that all of this is legal. The FBI had a warrant for the records it requested from Verizon, and, rather than break the law, Verizon obliged. Not everything was turned over to the government: Phone calls themselves are well protected by legal precedent, and obtaining warrants to listen to a tremendous amount of calls is much harder. Instead, the government asked for phone call metadata, which is kept and maintained by telecommunications companies. The metadata includes the time the call took place, the call origin, the call duration, and the carrier. In cellphones, it also includes the cell towers that transmitted the call, giving a rough approximation of the callers' physical location.

This information is all vulnerable because of a legal precedent set back in 1979. Phone call records were deemed not part of the protected private information of an individual, but instead the property of the telephone company. This problem resurfaced last month, when the Associated Press reported that the Department of Justice subpoenaed the call records for many of their writers as part of an ongoing leak investigation. It was a perfectly legal way for the government to obtain that information, but gathering metadata from calls is far more revealing now than it was in the 1970s.

Niraji Chokshi and Matt Berman note:

It's conceivable that the National Security Agency is using this information from Verizon to track and identify every individual from their phone records. But that's a time- and data-intensive project. The request from Verizon dates to April 19, the date the surviving Boston bomber was arrested in Watertown, Mass. If there is a specific terrorist the NSA is trying to find, plotting the location of every single person by their phone records is the functional equivalent of combining a dozen haystacks into one great big pile with the hope of finding the one needle.

More likely is that this is a collection boon for general big data projects. The NSA has been mining phone records on a large scale since at least 2006, and a data set in the millions provides a tremendous resource for finding and discerning new patterns.

What new patterns? The NSA, by and large, has a mandate to collect intelligence on foreign communications and "foreign signals intelligence," which for our purposes involves electronic communication. There's a tremendous amount of information in the communications they regularly intercept, but because their focus is foreign, there's no clear control group for domestic communications that's different. The tremendous amount of data contained in the Verizon records gives the NSA a largely-domestic data set to work with, and then new information to refine their intelligence collection process. It gives them a baseline.

The Verizon data collection is fascinating tool set for spooks. Though perfectly legal, it's based on a 1970s understanding of phone record privacy. And the way it's going to be used is all 21st century.

Audi is a company that loves to make its cars do the work for you. Its self-driving car may not be on the market yet, but its latest addition to its Audi Connect service solves a greater headache than having to actually steer: Finding parking.

Rather than blindly meandering through the streets looking for a garage, only to find one that's overflowing with cars, Audi drivers can now flip through a list of nearby garages in the car's navigational system. The service launched yesterday for all cars already equipped with Audi Connect.

You can then sort options by price, and location, see the entrance on Google Street View, and when possible, see how many spaces are available. The database lists more than 18,000 garages and parking lots in North America--and 42,000 in Europe--through INRIX, a company that provides real-time traffic data. Unfortunately, it won't park it for you.

CNET reports that INRIX is working on letting drivers rate parking options and pay for their spots electronically--because rolling down the window to pay can be so tiring.

[CNET]