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In Japan, Cyclists Can Now Store Bikes In Underground Robot Cavern

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Prevent your bike from being stolen by keeping it in a batcave basically

In most cities, being a cyclist means you will have your vehicle stolen and/or vandalized on a semi-regular basis. That's just how it works. But in Tokyo, as Danny Choo shows us, your bike actually gets sucked down into an underground bike cavern, protected from the outside world.

The video above shows how this works: there are several (more to come) parking stations, made by a company called Giken, which look sort of like public bathrooms. But do not pee in them! Instead, stick your bike in them--your bike should have a little magnetic key, sort of like an EZ-Pass, that gives you access to park your bike. The doors clamp on your bike's front wheel, and your bike is lowered down into a big underground cylinder.

The machine files your bike away onto a little platform just for it. No need to lock it, since it's not like a thief can go down into the cylinder, and the fact that it's underground also protects it from vandalism and inclement weather. Each station can hold about 200 bikes.

Giken is looking to expand and built more stations. It seems like it takes up quite a bit of space underground--in cities where there's lots of stuff underground, including subway tunnels, it might be tricky to litter the city with the stations. But it's a pretty elegant system: secure, clean, and probably profitable.

[via Danny Choo (warning: site includes lots of picture of underdressed/naked anime dolls)]

    



How Not To Be A Dad: The Latest Science Of Male Birth Control

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How can we prevent these spoons, uh, sperms, from being successful?

Sexy Eggs on Flickr

Examining 8 promising methods of male contraception in development. Happy Father's Day!


Click here to enter the gallery

Male birth control, like flying cars, just seems like one of those things we should have by now. It's the 21st century-if they can find the Higgs Boson and bring back Arrested Development, shouldn't they be able to come up with a birth control option for men that isn't a condom or a vasectomy?

It's hardly for lack of trying. There's the classic "men have millions of sperm, but women have only one egg" argument, but that's far from the only challenge. For a long time, it was widely assumed that men just wouldn't be interested, though research has since proved that assumption wrong.

"I think largely, it was a generational shift, too," says Elaine Lissner, director of the Male Contraception Information Project (MICP). "Once the Baby Boomers came into power, there was more openness to the concept, versus the generation before the Baby Boomers."

Interest in the scientific community has grown to the point that the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has hosted several conferences on developing male birth control methods. But pharmaceutical companies are the ones that will need to show interest in order for something to really get off the ground. And they've been largely hesitant, so far. Unlike a drug for, say, cancer, birth control ostensibly would be used by otherwise healthy men, which means there's a much higher bar for safety.

"I see it as they're just not willing to put their toe in the water," says Diana Blithe, program director for the Contraceptive Development Research Centers Program and the Male Contraceptive Development Program at the NICHD. "But if there was a prototype on the market, I think others would come relatively quickly. It's just [that] getting the first [one] all the way through the hurdles is a relatively long process. And it's not something that they see as an immediate return on their investment. I think that it's something that you really have to have a long vision for and companies tend not to have a very long vision... Nothing is going to get to market soon."

But the biggest challenge is that even among those pursuing male birth control, no one can seem to agree on the best way to do it. Everyone I talk to tells me three more methods I should look into. Pills, injections, implants or procedures? Hormonal or non-hormonal? After talking to many researchers and experts in the field, I compiled eight different male contraception methods that are currently in development and outlined the cost, convenience, effectiveness, reversibility and status of each, in the gallery above.

    


The 10 Coolest Innovations We Saw At E3 2013

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E3 Lobby

Colin Lecher

The greatest games and gear from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, plus awesome hardware and indie fare.

The big three--Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo--came out firing on all cylinders at E3 this year. We checked out two new consoles, a stable of games, and other innovations on display from the companies. Meanwhile, some well-known gadget-builders turned up with ground-breaking designs for mobile game systems and laptops, while indie developers showed off creative, unexpected game designs. Here, we've rounded up our 10 favorite things from the show.

    


The Energy Fix: Engineering Triumphs Over Wave And Tidal Forces

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Water Energy

Engineers designed TidGen, which is 98-feet wide and 31-feet tall, for tidal bodies, such as bays, between 60 and 150 feet deep. • A permanent-magnet generator mounted between the four turbines produces up to 150 kw. • The TidGen's helical turbines have teardrop-shaped foils and rotate in a single direction, regardless of the flow of the current. • A power-and-data cable connects an array of up to a couple of dozen TidGen units to an onshore substation.

Nick Kaloterakis

How water could be harnessed for roughly a third of U.S. annual electricity usage


The Bottom Feeder

Water is 800 times denser than air, and building a gen­erator able to withstand the tremendous force it generates has hampered the development of next-gen hydropower. If engineers can harness its energy, water holds great potential: about 1,420 terawatt-hours per year, or roughly a third of U.S. annual electricity usage.

Tame the Tide

Tidal currents are among the most predictable energy sources on Earth. Until recently, the only way to capture their power was to construct massive dams that impeded the flow of water, often in sensitive marine areas. The TidGen, developed by the Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC), sits at the bottom of a free-flowing deep river or bay instead. The company installed its first commercial unit in Maine's Cobscook Bay last summer, and it began delivering electricity to the U.S. grid shortly thereafter. A TidGen can produce up to 150 kW, or enough electricity to power 25 homes, but ORPC plans to add 5 megawatts of capacity within three to five years.

Catch the Waves

Wave energy is more evenly distributed across the globe than tidal currents, but it's also more violent: Generators floating on the surface of the ocean must function while being thrashed around. London-based 40South Energy built a wave-energy converter that cleverly avoids abuse. It remains submerged in the water column, automatically adjusting its depth to find optimal conditions and dodge rough storms. The machine generates energy as its top half, attached to a suspended platform, pulls against the bottom half, moored to the seafloor. 40South plans to deploy its first commercial unit, the 150-kilowatt R115, near Tuscany, Italy, this summer. It's also developing a 2-megawatt version and setting up pilot wave-energy parks in India, Italy, and the U.K.

    


Watch This Insane Helicopter-Bike Fly Around

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Surface-bound Citibikes are so last week.

Hey, cyclists: why are you still bicycling on asphalt like chumps when there's this (totally safe-looking, not at all super-dangerous) flying bicycle?

Just kidding! You're not allowed to pilot this just yet, actually. The helicopter-bike is a prototype developed by a team of three Czech companies, which just took it for a five-minute test flight inside a Prague exhibition hall. That's actually a lightweight dummy in the driver's seat, since those massive propellers make this thing weigh over 200 pounds, meaning it's not yet flyable with the weight of a human on board.

But please, please make this for humans soon, somebody. Going to make for an interesting Tour de France.

[Associated Press]

    


What Happens To Women When They're Denied Abortions?

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Coming to Term

San Luis Obispo County California

A first-of-its-kind study tracks the health of women who are denied abortions.

Plenty of research has examined how getting an abortion affects women's mental health. (In short, it doesn't, though individual circumstances vary enough that universal statements about women's reactions can be misleading.)

But what about those who want an abortion, but can't get one? Like S., a woman the New York Times Magazine interviewed. S. was 24 when she first found she was pregnant and decided to get an abortion. Click the link to read about her attempts to get the procedure, including one unwitting visit to a clinic where a nurse gave her an ultrasound and told her, "Look! Your baby is smiling at you."

Ultimately, as is the case with most women who are turned away from abortion clinics, S.'s 20-week-old pregnancy was too far along. The opening sequence ends with S. set on a certain road:

She was out of gas money, hadn't eaten a decent meal in weeks and resigned herself to the fact that, no matter what she wanted or how it would affect her life, she was going to have a baby.

Strangely, researchers have never followed American women who, like S., couldn't get the abortions they wanted, the New York Times Magazine reported. That's about to change. The magazine reported on a study, led by Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and professor of ob-gyn at the University of California, San Francisco. Foster's study is the first to track American women like this over a longer period of time-and the first in the world to compare those women with peers who successfully received abortions.

Although her study is ongoing, Foster already has some answers. Compared to their peers who received abortions, women who can't get the abortions they want have poorer health and are more likely to live in poverty two years on, even though they qualified for government assistance programs as new moms. Meanwhile, everybody in the study, whether they got abortions or not, generally had the same levels of depression and anxiety.

With time, Foster's study will be able to assess how well mothers like S. bond with their children, how well those babies fare, and how well their mothers fare financially in the long term.

Whether Foster's results will budge the beliefs of those on either side of the abortion debate remains to be seen. There's nothing in the study to address the concerns of people who find abortion immoral-in fact, that's a question science simply can't answer.

[New York Times Magazine]

    


Microwave Balloons Could Form New Super-Fast Transatlantic Trading Line

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Hot Air Balloons above Albuquerque

Bill Johnson, via Wikimedia Commons

The new frontier in finance?

Perseus Telecom, a network provider that specializes in rapid trading, is seriously looking into an ultra-high-speed transatlantic trading line, made possible by balloons and microwave transmission.

Microwave transmission is a kind of radio, which uses very tiny radio waves (mirco ones, even!) to send data from a small transmitter in a straight line to a reciever. In the last century, microwave transmission has carried long-distance phone calls and some television signals. In recent years, satellite communication and fiber-optic cables have replaced microwave transmission for most functions, because they can carry larger messages more cheaply.

In the world of finance, however, microwave is experiencing a Renaissance. Microwave transmission is much faster than other methods, which matters a great deal in modern, algorithm-accelerated high-frequency trading, in which price changes of fractions of a cent can be exploited by a fast algorithm to generate thousands of trades. Faster trading, and the ability to transmit those trades by ultra-fast microwaves, gives a company major competitive advantage. While this is just starting to take off on Wall Street, some firms are looking to bring it to international stock markets.

Microwave transmission requires a straight line in order to make the signal hit. This isn't so much of a problem on land, where relay towers are easily constructed, but it's really tricky when trying to cross an entire ocean. New York firm Perseus Telecom thinks balloons might be the answer.

Drawing inspiration from somewhat-dubious military designs, a balloon network would float above the ocean and constantly maintain alignment between transmitters and receivers. It's just at the speculation stage now, but if Wall Street sees money in it, expect microwave balloons to become a reality very soon.

    


FYI: What Makes Tattoos Permanent?

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How tattoos work

SCIENCE INK by Carl Zimmer. Published by Sterling Publishing © 2011

And how does tattoo removal work?

It's all about the particles in the tattoo ink's pigment says Dr. Anne Laumann, MBChB, a professor of dermatology at Northwestern University.

Tattoo application uses a mechanized needle to puncture the skin and inject ink into the dermis or second layer of skin just below the epidermis. Since the process involves damaging the skin, the body responds with white blood cells which attempt to absorb the foreign particles and dispose of them in the blood stream.

"The reason pigment stays there is because the pigment particles are too big to be eaten by the white cells, so they just sit there," Laumann says.

Pigment particles are too big to be eaten by white cells, so they just sit there.Tattoos have become increasingly popular in recent years. According to a 2010 Pew Research Report, approximately 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have at least one tattoo.

The problem with tattoos is exactly what makes them so appealing--their permanency. "If you have the name of your boyfriend on there and then you marry somebody else, that's a problem," Laumann says.

Tattoos also tend to become problematic with age. Ink can become blurred if injected too deeply into the skin, causing the pigment to migrate beyond the intended area. Fading and distortion due to changes in body shape are also common problems with tattoos. Permanent makeup--or tattoos that resemble eyeliner or other makeup--is a prime example of how these problems can lead to dissatisfaction years after the ink is applied because skin sags and changes shape with age.

If you have the name of your boyfriend on there and then you marry somebody else, that's a problem."The problem with that is as you get older the shape of the fold of the skin changes," Laumann says. "So not only does it bleed a bit because the pigment moves gradually over time and so those will tend to become sort of smoky edges, but also the whole line might become a little distorted over the years."

When a tattoo is no longer desirable, whether it's faded or causing a bad case of buyer's regret, you can burn it or cut it out--but the safest and most effective method is a laser treatment.

To remove a tattoo using a laser, the light beam zeroes in on a single color (in most cases black) and breaks up the pigments' particles until they are small enough to be carried away by white blood cells. The process is extensive, usually requiring many sessions depending upon the size and color of the tattoo. Removal may also cause scarring.

"The big problem with tattoo removal is that it's really hard to get the whole tattoo out," Laumann says. "Using a laser often leaves a coloration afterward, I mean it's really hard. People get frustrated because it takes them so long and laser treatments are expensive."

So maybe you should just get your mom a nice card instead of using ink to proclaim your love.

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

    



'NeuroKnitting' Turns Brain Scans Into Personalized Scarves

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For if you're just really into expressing yourself through clothing.

Have you ever felt your clothing just doesn't say enough about you? As in, you're willing to go to semi-obsessive lengths to show everyone your thoughts? Almost literally, your thoughts? Then perhaps you should try on this scarf, designed from your very own brain scan.

It's called NeuroKnitting (soon we will have an invention for every noun, with "Neuro" right behind it). To personalize the scarf, the inventors strap an EEG headset onto a person's head, then monitor his or her brain activity as Bach's "Goldberg Variations" play--a "mood inducer," according to the designers. Three scans, based on three parts of the brain, are then stitched into a two-color scarf using an automated knitting machine.

This is still just a design experiment, so it doesn't look like you can actually get one yet. But maybe by next winter?

    


U.S. Supreme Court Rules On Gene Patents

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U.S. Supreme Court

United States Courts

Naturally occurring genes cannot be patented, but synthetic ones can.

The U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled today on patenting breast-cancer genes. The ruling found that naturally occurring genes aren't patentable. If you make a synthetic version, however, that is your own work.

"The Court's decision strikes a middle ground that likely will not be particularly disruptive," Tom Goldstein, a Harvard Law School professor and publisher of SCOTUSblog, wrote in his publication's liveblog about the ruling.

Scientists from Myriad Genetics in Utah were the first to find and isolate BRCA1 and BRCA2, two major genes that affect people's chances of getting hereditary breast, ovarian and other cancers. The company holds numerous patents relating to those discoveries, which opponents say is unreasonable, because genes are products of nature, not patentable inventions. The case made its way to the Supreme Court because one group-including doctors, researchers and patient advocacy organizations-has been challenging Myriad Genetics' BRCA1 and BRCA2 patents since 2009.

Among Myriad's patents are ones that say the company has the rights to any isolated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. That means it has the exclusive right to offer testing for those genes, since you gotta isolate 'em to test for 'em. Yes, those are the same tests that, for example, Angelina Jolie took before deciding to get a preventative double mastectomy.

The new ruling says that even when isolated, naturally occurring genes aren't patentable because they're a product of nature, just like Myriad Genetics' opponents originally claimed. It doesn't matter that Myriad Genetics invested a lot of money, time and talent into finding BRCA1 and BRCA2. "Groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy the §101 inquiry," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court's opinion. §101 distinguishes between patentable inventions and un-patentable abstractions.

Nevertheless, some products from Myriad Genetics' research into BRCA1 and BRCA2 received protection from the Supreme Court ruling. When the company builds synthetic versions of the genes that are different from how they appear in nature, then those genes are patentable. The Supreme Court opinion talks about Myriad scientists making synthetic breast-cancer genes that have everything removed except for the portions responsible for coding proteins. It wasn't immediately clear from the opinion what Myriad plans to do with those synthetic genes.

Gene patenting is a legally contested area in a variety of genetic sciences, not just cancer genetics. Thomas concluded the court opinion with an eye for other interested parties that are watching. The Myriad Genetics ruling doesn't apply to genes that have been altered from their natural state, he wrote. That should include many genetically engineered crops, for example.

The ruling also doesn't preclude Myriad from patenting uses of the knowledge it gained from BRCA1 and BRCA2, Thomas wrote.

    


Ambien Can Improve Your Recall, But Only For Unhappy Memories

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Sweet Dreams?

Wikimedia Commons

A new study finds that the sleeping pill enhances your ability to consolidate negative emotional memories as you snooze.

If you're having a rough day, popping a sleeping pill and hitting the sack could be the worst thing you could do--it could help you recall bad memories even better than usual. Ambien has been shown to boost your brain's ability to store and consolidate memories. But it appears to work explicitly for negative emotional memories, according to new research from psychologists at the University of California.

During stage 2 sleep, sleep spindles--little flashes of brain activity--help the brain process short-term memories into long-term memories. A previous study by psychologist Sara Mednick of UC Riverside found that sleep spindles play a role in processing explicit memory, or specific facts, and a greater density of sleep spindles can enhance verbal memory.

In a new study published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Mednick and her team show sleep spindles also affect how we recall emotional memories, an area that had been associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep before.

Researchers gave 28 participants two different sleep aids--zolpidem (Ambien), which has been shown to increase the density of sleep spindles, and sodium oxybate (Xyrem) which decreases spindle activity. They then viewed one-second images designed to provoke a positive or negative response, before taking supervised naps. (Science: Just like kindergarten!) After taking zolpidem, their memory was enhanced--but it only increased their ability to remember the negative images, specifically those that were considered "high arousal" (like pictures of a hairy car wreck or a snake poised to attack, rather than an image of people standing around a grave). Somewhat surprisingly, sodium oxybate did not lead to a decrease in the ability to recall negative emotions, despite the decrease in spindle activity.

This could be a result of our natural tendency to recall the bad, rather than the good. "We do seem to have a stronger memory for negative emotions," Mednick told me. This could be a result of the multiple parts of the brain involved in consolidating memories of fear--it not only activates the hippocampus, but also involves the amygdala. "The more brain areas you can recruit, the better your processing," she explains. If we naturally recall these negative feelings better anyway, by increasing the mechanism by which we process memories during sleep, Ambien helps usher more negative memories into our long-term recall.

Mednick says this could impact Ambien users who suffer from anxiety disorders and PTSD. "These are people who already have heightened memory for negative and high-arousal memories. Sleep drugs might be improving their memories for things they don't want to remember," she said in a statement. It could also have implications for the use of benzodiazepines, a class of drugs (including Valium) used to treat anxiety and insomnia, with similar effects on sleep.

[Medical Xpress]

    


School District To Pay Science Teachers More Than English Teachers

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Students In Laos

Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to market-based compensation.

For most public schools, teachers get paid on the same scale regardless of which subject they teach. But a Colorado school district has decided to pay salaries based on supply and demand instead, Reuters reports, which means high school science teachers will earn more than their counterparts in the English department.

Under the plan, launching next month, the suburban school district of Douglas County will begin paying the entire staff (3,300 people) based on subject and grade level. Special education therapists will earn up to $94,000, while educators deemed less in-demand, like art, physical education, and elementary school teachers, will be in the bottom bracket, earning a maximum of $64,000. English teachers in middle schools or high schools will make up to $72,000, while high-school math and science teachers will be capped at $82,000.

It's not quite an upward climb across every grade, though: kindergarten and first-grade teachers, dealing with especially young kids, will get paid more than other elementary teachers under the system. No pay cuts are coming for any of the teachers, but bonuses will be adjusted based on subject.

The market-based policy is pretty controversial among the staff, as you can imagine. One English teacher told Reuters, "I really don't believe a P.E. teacher works less than I do. He has more kids than I do. And he may be the one who's keeping some kids in school so they'll sit through my class." It remains to be seen if the idea catches on anywhere else.

[Reuters]

    


Green Coffee Bean Extract Probably Won't Help You Lose Weight

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Unroasted coffee beans

Dan Bollinger via Wikimedia Commons

And, according to this new mouse study, the common diet supplement might make you more likely to develop type 2 diabetes.

While drinking coffee has been shown to have health benefits, a trendy extract of unroasted coffee beans used in weight-loss supplements is not as promising. In a new mouse study, scientists in Australia showed that the extract didn't have any effect on body fat-but it did seem to have a harmful impact on the mice's insulin resistance.

During the experiment, one group of 10 mice ate a high-fat diet for 12 weeks. Another group of 10 mice ate the same high-fat diet supplemented with chlorogenic acid (a compound in green coffee beans for which weight loss claims have been made). After 12 weeks, both groups of mice had become equally fatter. But the group of mice that had been eating chlorogenic acid every day were significantly more insulinresistant-a condition associated with high blood sugar and type 2 diabetes.

This one animal study certainly doesn't prove that green coffee bean extract is bad for humans, but it does suggest that more research is needed before celebs like Dr. Oz can responsibly tout its benefits.

The study appears in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

    


New Hope For Regrowing Severed Limbs, Just Like Lizards' Tails

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Wrinkly Finger

Wikimedia Commons

Pretty good superpower to have, if you ask me.

Some lizards and amphibians have the ability to regrow severed tails or limbs--in fact, the blue-tailed skink abandons its tail intentionally to distract predators. But humans, despite our amazing advancements in the field of spying on each other, are typically thought to lack this superpower-like ability. But in fact, we're more like blue-tailed skinks than you'd think!

Back in 2010, a woman named Deepa Kulkarni lost the tip of her finger to an altercation with a slammed door. She was able to grow it back with the use of a powder made of ground-up pig bladder (seriously) called MatriStem which, according to ACell, the company that makes it, "incorporates into the surrounding tissue during the healing process and leaves new tissue where scar tissue formation is normally expected." Basically, MatriStem works as a sort of scaffolding--it attracts stem cells from, they think, the bone marrow, which comes out and builds tissue on top of the MatriStem powder rather than merely scarring over. It worked for Kulkarni, but it was theorized that it only worked because she retained a bit of the nail on her partially-severed finger.

Dr. Mayumi Ito, a stem cell biologist and dermatologist at NYU's Langone Medical Center, recently published a paper in which he and his team examined exactly how this works, and confirmed the theory about the fingernail. Turns out the human fingernail includes a group of stem cells that promote cell growth--not just the rest of a fingernail, but tissue and even bone. Ito named this family of stem cells "Wnts," pronounced "wints," and found that in mice, these cells produce chemicals that regrew bone and flesh.

So what if, in the absence of natural Wnts, you used genetic engineering to force tissue to produce these proteins? Would the natural effect--regrown tissue and bone--follow?

Amazingly, yes. When they forced the production of Wnts in mice, the team managed to regrow bone and tissue without any of the natural stem cells being present at all. This has huge implications for the treatment of amputations--the experiment was only performed on mice, but if the technique holds true for humans, this could be the beginning of the end for lost limbs.

[via MedicalDaily]

    


A Beautiful Timelapse Video Of A Rotating Thunderstorm In Texas

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Slow down a supercell, add some angelic music, and it almost looks welcoming.

Supercells are tornado-like, rotating thunderstorms. They can be terrifying. But this timelapse, taken by photographer Mike Olbinski in north Texas, is actually lovely.

Over at his blog, Olbinski explains how he, with the help of a friend, caught the video, which is split into four parts:

The first section ends because it started pouring on us. We should have been further south when we started filming but you never know how long these things will last, so I started the timelapse as soon as I could.
One thing to note early on in the first part is the way the rain is coming down on the right and actually being sucked back into the rotation. Amazing.
A few miles south is where part two picks up. And I didn't realize how fast it was moving south, so part three is just me panning the camera to the left. During that third part you can see dust along the cornfield being pulled into the storm as well…part of the strong inflow. The final part is when the storm had started dying out and we shot lightning as it passed over us.
Between the third and fourth portions we drove through Booker, Texas where tornado sirens were going off…it was creepy as all heck. And intense.

Intense is an understatement.

[Mike Olbinski]

    



What Can We Learn From Spying On Our Own Metadata?

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Big Data

DARPA

Why let the NSA have all the fun?

Okay, so the National Security Agency is sitting on a treasure trove of all your metadata. What exactly can they learn about you from something as vague as the time and duration of your calls?

That's what Gabe Stein, resident news hacker at Co.Labs, aims to find out--by spying on himself:

Performing simple data-mining on an individual level is becoming much easier, thanks to numerous prediction libraries available in just about any programming language and powerful cloud-based tools like Google's Prediction API. To understand exactly what the government can do with this metadata, I decided to beat the NSA at its game by spying on my own data.

While the government can get your Verizon cell data in a breeze, it is naturally much harder to get ahold of it yourself. Stein wrote a Ruby script to mine his own metadata from his Google Voice account. His goal: to figure out whether he could identify the gender of a caller based solely on the time of day of a call and how long it lasted.

He pulled 20 random phone numbers from his call history and marked whether they belonged to a man or a woman. Then he used all the calls from those 20 numbers as his test samples, including the time and duration of call. Google's Prediction API gave his model a 67 percent confidence level in predicting the gender of a caller after training with those 861 test examples. Though by scientific terms, that's not particularly accurate, Stein "found it surprisingly good at determining a caller's gender."

As he points out, his results might be skewed by his small, individually-specific sample, but it's a testament to exactly how much you could find out about a person with even more specific algorithms and access to a huge amounts of data:

Most importantly, if that's what I can do with a limited set of my own data, imagine what the NSA can do with the datasets it has access to. If you don't think determining an anonymous caller's gender is particularly useful, think about the other things you might find out from a better set of data and more precise algorithms, like which callers are likely to be related to one another (I'm going to try that one on myself next), or with location data, where they're likely to be at any given time.

For aspiring spooks, he's taking suggestions on how he should spy on himself next here.

[Co.Labs]

    


Faroe Islands Wants To Sequence The Genes Of Every One Of Its Citizens

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The Faroe Islands

The Faroe Islands look lovely! Very pretty place.

Wikimedia Commons

At least, everyone who wants it. But do they want it?

Welcome to the Faroe Islands, a beautiful rocky archipelago in the North Atlantic, a Danish territory located about halfway between Iceland and Scotland. It's a small and ancient place, with a population of around only 50,000, but with a distinct language and its own take on Nordic culture. As a result of its relative isolation and small population, it has a very homogenous genetic pool, even by Scandinavian standards, which means it's at risk for niche health problems that wouldn't affect larger and more diverse countries.

After several Faroese died from a rare condition called carnitine transporter deficiency (CTD), the country's ministry of health convinced more than half of the entire population of the country to submit blood samples to a giant centralized facility. The country's aim is to get the sequenced genome of the whole country, enabling them to get a broader view of the health needs of the Faroese and hopefully enabling doctors to make more educated decisions about treatment.

In the short term, it's not clear exactly what benefit the program, called FarGen, will have; this isn't a research program with a distinct aim or goal. The hope is that eventually, when a disease like CTD is discovered, that doctors will be able to search through everyone's history and figure out exactly who's at risk, getting them the healthcare they need as soon as possible.

The other side? The government now has access to everyone's DNA. That might be alarming, especially to Americans, who are currently coping with the government's recently revealed access to the online life of citizens. Genetic testing has some serious implications for healthcare, especially in countries like the US without widespread public coverage. It's too new to really get a sense for how governments will use this data--but the test case might be on 18 small islands in the North Atlantic.

[via Discover]

    


Cats Have 'Timeshares,' Kitty Cams Reveal

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Samantha

Samantha was not a part of the BBC cat behavior study, but she is still very nice to look at.

Evan Kafka via Suzanne LaBarre

Findings form one new research project tracked 50 cats in a village outside London

Wish I could do the same with my cat! The BBC and the Royal Veterinary College recently hung GPS trackers and small cameras onto the collars of 50 pet cats in a village outside of London. Their results form one of the largest-ever studies of domestic cats, according to the BBC.

It turns out that cats visit other yards and even other houses. Cats from neighboring houses sometimes appeared to switch off using the same territory, which helped them avoid confrontations. Nevertheless, the tracked cats still got into territorial squabbles, which you may have seen/heard.

In general, the cats had small territories, even though they had plenty of countryside available to them, veterinarian Alan Wilson wrote for the BBC. That finding jives with previous research on housecat habits.

The BBC has a page with profiles of 10 of their tracked cats, including maps of where each of the kitties went and excerpts from their cameras' footage.

Technologists at the BBC developed custom cat cams for the project. The final cameras had day and night settings, captured higher resolution footage than commercially available pet cameras, lasted eight to 10 hours on a single battery charge, and weighed just over an ounce. You can check out some pictures of cats wearing them.

BBC Two is airing a documentary today about the project. The scientists involved plan to publish a formal paper about their work in the future, Wilson wrote.

    


New York Considers 3-D Printed Gun Ban

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Cody Wilson tests the 3-D Printed Gun

Defense Distributed

Legislators try to solve a gun problem that doesn't yet exist

Two bills in New York City aim to keep 3-D printed guns off the streets.

The first bill, introduced by a New York City councilman Lewis Fidler (D-Brooklyn), limits the production of 3-D printed guns to licensed gunsmiths, and requires gunsmiths to notify the New York Police Department 72 hours prior to using a 3-D printer to make any gun part.

In the New York State Assembly Codes Committee, a different bill would outright ban the sales, use, and manufacture of 3-D printed guns.

Both of these bills go further than current federal regulation, which allows for the home manufacture of guns, provided the guns are not resold and fall within certain size and function restraints. The most notable restriction is that the receiver, which houses the working parts of the gun, has to be at least 20 percent completed by the person making it at home. This is such an established part of private gun assembly that there's a thriving market for 80 percent complete receivers.

Creating a full gun with a 3-D printer meets that requirement. While 3-D printed gun pioneer Defense Distributed got in trouble with the State Department for making gun plans available online, individuals who possess the necessary printer are free to make gun parts on their own until either of these laws pass.

This is fascinating because lawmakers are trying to regulate away a problem that doesn't exist yet. While some criminals get their guns from crooked gun makers, that's a problem that predates 3-D printing, and is only part of the highly saturated American black market gun trade. Right now, 3-D printed guns can only fire one bullet at a time, and poorly assembled guns explode when fired. Commercially produced guns are far more effective, available in greater numbers, and can even be assembled from kits full of untraceable parts.

At their very best, these pieces of legislation are preemptive, trying to future-proof the law against the inevitably better homemade guns of that will come with time. It's a bold move, but until home manufacture is cheaper than purchasing a gun off the black market, don't expect this legislation to save many lives, especially not with 310 million guns already in the U.S.

    


The First Known Fluorescent Vertebrate Is An Animal You've Probably Eaten Before

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Glowing Eel

Akiko Kumagai, Atsushi Miyawaki

You can really taste those fluorescent proteins.

There are many animals that display fluorescence. They have proteins in their tissue that glow when hit with light. But they're all invertebrates like jellyfish and coral polyps--at least, that's what we thought, until 2009, when a pair of Japanese chemists noticed something very odd going on with a very common fish. And now they've figured out what exactly is causing it.

The Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica, a freshwater species, is known as unagi in Japan, where it's an extremely common ingredient in the cuisine. It's grilled, served in sushi, and given many more preparations. The chemists, who primarily study food, were investigating how light interacts with the oily flesh of the eel, and noticed something odd: when hit with a blue light, the eel positively glows.

In a paper in the current issue of Nature the researchers describe how they isolated and identified the specific protein responsible for the fluorescence. After examining it, they noticed that it's very different from the proteins that cause fluorescence in other lifeforms. It shines brightly even with low oxygen levels, for one thing, and it also requires a substance called bilirubin, which is found in bile.

Those difference make the researchers think the protein could be used in medicine; fluorescent proteins are often used on humans to track proteins, almost like a tag.

The best part? The researchers named the protein UnaG. Get it?

[via Nature]

    


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