People conduct electric charges, and so do vegetables. This simple fact spurred designer Scott Garner to build the Beet Box: a machine that plays drum-kit sounds at the tap of a beet. The beets conduct body capacitance, or the electrical energy stored inside humans, to a sensor plugged into a Raspberry Pi mini-computer ("Pi" for short). Each touch triggers software to produce one of six percussion sounds. Garner hid the electronics inside a wooden enclosure with a lid so that striking the beets emits clashes and snares as if by magic.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Box. To house a Pi, a capacitive sensor, a power supply, and cables, make an 8-inch-square wooden box. Nail together two 4-inch-tall sides, two 12-inchtall sides, and an 8-inch square bottom using half-inch-thick wood. Drill a circle of small holes into the lid for a sound port (but don't nail it on). To the 12-inch-tall sides, add an 8-inch-square plank that's bored to fit six beets.

2. Computer. Configure a Pi to use I2C communication (this will allow it to communicate with the capacitive sensor). Load touch-sensing software onto the Pi so it can interpret the signals.

3. Beets. Solder six wires to individual electrode ports on an MPR121 capacitive touch sensor breakout board. Stick each wire into a different beet.

4. Wiring. Use a wire to connect the SDA port of the breakout board to pin 3 on the computer, and the SCL port to pin 5. Link the board and the Pi's grounds. Connect the board's 3.3V line to pin 1 and its IRQ line to pin 7 of the Pi.

5. Speakers. Hook up small speakers to Pi's audio port. Fit the board, Pi, and speakers inside the enclosure. Run a power cord to the Pi, drop the beets into their holes, then drop some beats.

Three researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including one of the co-creators of Google Glass, are working to develop a new piece of technology attire--for dogs. The project, FIDO (Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations), would allow dogs to communicate crucial information--be it about navigation for the blind, bombs for security, or diagnoses for doctors--to their handlers or owners, and has received grant funding from Google.

The basic idea behind the project is to combine technology with dog smarts. Dogs are some of the best security devices around. They can do everything from sniff a bomb to detect cancer. One thing they are not terribly good at, though, for obvious reasons, is communicating with people.

That's where FIDO comes into play. A sensor/transmitter device attaches to the dog's collar or vest, or to the dog's handler. Say the dog is out to diagnose forms of cancer, and detects bowel cancer in a patient. The dog can then trigger the appropriate sensor by "biting, tugging, or putting their mouth nearby," Technology Review explains. Each sensor would correspond to a different scent (or in this case, form of cancer), and with training the dogs would learn to associate a particular scent with a particular sensor. After the sensor is triggered, the information can be transmitted to a device or directly to the handler's ear, effectively enabling dog-to-human communication.

FIDO would benefit national security and the military (which admitted three years ago that its expensive efforts to engineer bomb-sniffing machines were in vain), rescue operations (where dogs could communicate what they had found, while humans remained at a safe distance), doctors (for diagnosing diseases), and even, potentially, the common dog owner (for preventing in-house doggy messes).

The device is still in development, but with funding from Google, significant advances are probably forthcoming. Maybe the FIDO team can combine forces with K9 Storm to create a super dog.

[via MIT Technology Review]

With the help of a new laser ranging system, we might soon be able to send a laser beam to Mars--and hit our target within a millimeter. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of high-precision laser system that can span interplanetary distances with millimeter accuracy.

Most current laser technology uses passive ranging, meaning it bounces light off a reflector. This works for relatively short distances, like from the Earth to the Moon--238,900 miles--but at longer stretches, the laser's signal peters out. Depending on where Mars and Earth are in their respective orbits, the distance between the two is between about 34 million and 249 million miles.

The new system doesn't make the lasers themselves more powerful. Rather, it increases the ability to detect laser pulses over long distances by using active, synchronised receivers on both ends that can send and receive laser pulses. "The key is to have a very sensitive receiver and a method to pick out the 'signal' photons from all the background light," one of the scientists, Kevin Birnbaum, told Phys.org.

So far, the system has only been field-tested on Earth, but its creators hope to test it across greater distances soon. "In principle, this approach could be scaled up to any interplanetary distance by increasing the size of the telescopes," Birnbaum said. "We calculated that ranging from Earth to Mars or Jupiter should be achievable with quite modest telescopes of 1 meter in diameter on Earth and 15 centimeters on the spacecraft."

High precision lasers with interplanetary range could help scientists more accurately measure gravitational fields and determine the make-up of the planetary cores. Gravity tests with the new laser system could "help to quantify the apparent acceleration of the expanding universe, the possible existence of extra dimensions, and the reconciliation of quantum mechanics with gravity," the researchers write in their paper describing the system.

The study appears in Applied Physics Letters.

[Phys.org]

When we asked Popular Science readers to submit their biggest, boldest science and technology project ideas to the #CrowdGrant Challenge, we honestly weren't sure what to expect.

Well, you all delivered. Big time. Hundreds of ideas poured in from all over the world, but two dozen submissions excited us the most.

The winning projects include everything from a fusion propulsion research chamber and a handheld cancer scanner to a biological lightbulb and a better sewing needle. We even accepted a scientifically informed peace movement against mean people (because who likes mean people?).

Over the next 45 days, we'll highlight as many individual projects -- and the folks behind them -- as we can. But there's no need to wait around, because all of the winners are live and ready for your contributions through our partner, RocketHub.com: popularscience.rockethub.com/>

So what are you waiting for? Do something amazing, make history, and crowdfund the finalists that you're excited about in exchange for cool rewards offered up by project leaders. Note: The window for contributing closes on Aug. 30 at 11:59pm EDT.

Follow the conversation or spread the word about projects on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and more.

Any questions? Email us at crowdgrant@popsci.com

To commemorate the launch of 4G services in the UK, artist Brendan Dawes was commissioned to create these beautiful "digital portraits" of 11 cities. Really they're more like "social media user portraits," since that was the data used, though it's not totally clear which social media that entails. What we do know is that Dawes tracked the biggest news stories over three days in October 2012, then graphed them in these gorgeous flower shapes. He explains the project over at his site:

The subjects--"Romney," "Skyfall," "4G"--are color-coded, and each circle at top represents a minute. The more mentions a subject got every minute, the larger the circle. Other cities, you can see, follow a similar pattern, but are shaped slightly differently.

Which doesn't answer everything: Do the position of the circles mean anything? Are the lines all connected to the circles? Which stories are the "biggest"? It's more than a little confusing. Still pretty, though.

Check out more over at Dawes's site.

[Brendan Dawes via Creative Applications Network]

"Better Living Through Curiosity," by Tom Clynes, originally appeared in the December 2004 issue of Popular Science magazine. Inventor and engineer Amar Bose died July 12, 2013, at his home in Wayland, Mass. He was 83.-Eds.

Amar Bose is the most lead-footed septuagenarian I have ever seen behind the wheel. We're zipping along the coast of the Hawaiian island where he spends a few weeks every year, and as Bose maneuvers through the curves, I try to account for his driving confidence. He has professed to me a lifelong enthusiasm for sportscars, so there's that. There's also his perfect eyesight (thanks, he says, to a series of eye exercises he does daily). More mundanely, there's the radar detector on his dashboard.

But after spending a couple days with Bose talking about everything from network theory and cold fusion to philosophy and badminton, I'm convinced that there's something more fundamental behind his penchant for speed. Amar Bose is just incredibly eager to get to the future.

As an MIT professor and as CEO of the eponymous company that he built from scratch, Bose has made breakthroughs in an astonishingly broad range of disciplines, including acoustics, aviation, defense, even nuclear physics. At times, he says, he has risked the entire company in pursuit of a particular idea. "I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs," he tells me. "But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn't been done before."

It turns out that curiosity did not kill the company. Whatever its founder's intentions, the Bose Corporation does in fact make money-but what it does with that money is certainly in line with his original mission. According to Bose, most of the profits on the company's estimated sales of $1.7 billion are plowed back into research. "One of the best decisions I ever made was keeping the company privately held, so we can take short-term pain for long-term gain," he says. "Public companies have to look good every 90 days to please the markets, so they can't do that."

"I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never went into business to make money."As we drive, Bose, slim and energetic at 75, leans into his stories much as he leans into the road's curves. He speaks with a gravelly voice and an enthusiasm reminiscent of George C. Scott's character in the movie Dr. Strangelove.

Bose's rental Cadillac isn't equipped with one of the high-end sound systems for which the Bose name is famous. Nor is it outfitted with what may be his most audacious innovation yet, the Bose Suspension System. Unveiled this summer after 24 years of R&D, the Bose suspension is a mega-breakthrough that replaces automotive shock absorbers with ultrafast linear electric motors. The system, which Bose expects to bring to market within four years, isolates the passenger compartment from bumps and dips and, at the same time, eliminates pitching and rolling during braking and turning.

So how did Bose Corp. come to produce such a thing? Simple: The founder got curious. Bose had been tinkering with cars since the 19505. "I wondered," he says, "what a car suspension could do without hardware constraints, if you could have any force you wanted, at any time, between the body and the wheel."

In 1980 he decided to find out. Automakers had spent half a century optimizing fluid-based suspension hardware, but Bose came at it from a completely different direction, disregarding hardware assumptions and limitations and focusing first on figuring out what kind of performance was theoretically possible. The research program began with five years of mathematical analysis, which revealed a tremendous performance gap, one that could not be closed by making adjustments to existing shock-absorber hardware.

"A shock absorber can only absorb energy," says Tom Froeschle, Bose Corp.'s vice president of engineering. "Plus, the inherent inertia of fluids makes any pneumatic or hydraulic system incapable of reacting fast enough to give us the performance we were looking for."

In 1985 the team began focusing on an electromagnetic solution. Such an approach would be possible only with high-efficiency, high-power linear motors and amplifiers. It would require extremely complex control algorithms to stabilize the motors and superquick microcomputers to run the system.

None of which existed.

Bose's father, a political dissident who had been active in the Indian independence movement, immigrated to the U.S. in 1920, married, and moved to a suburb of Philadelphia. As a kid in the 1930s, Amar began taking model trains apart, and by the time he was 13, he could diagnose and fix most radios.

During World War II, the elder Bose's business-importing coconut-fiber doormats from India-became impossible when nonmilitary shipping was suspended. The teenage Amar suggested that his father post signs at the hardware stores where he once sold his mats, offering radio-repair services. With his father gathering the radios and young Amar fixing them in the basement after school, the business helped support the family through the war years.

After the war ended, Bose used surplus radar tubes and an oil-burner transformer to build the neighborhood's first television. In 1947 his father borrowed $10,000 so that Bose could attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to which he says he was admitted "by the skin of my teeth."

Although Bose had tremendous practical experience in electronics, he came to MIT lacking a background in calculus. Realizing that he was "outclassed," he applied himself to his studies with a tenacity he had lacked in high school. Among other austerity measures, he limited himself to two hours a week listening to his beloved classical music.

Eventually he would debunk most of the prevailing wisdom on high-fidelity sound reproduction.Nine years later, Bose finished his doctoral research and decided to reward himself with a first-class stereo system. He approached the task, he says, like a typical engineer. "I studied the literature and bought the best system based on the specifications. But when I brought it home and plugged it in, it sounded terrible. I was disappointed and confused. Why did so much of what I had been taught say it should be good, when my ears said it wasn't?"

Suddenly the task of writing his doctoral thesis on complex variable theory became drudgery. Now Bose's thoughts were occupied by acoustics and psychoacoustics (the study of the human perception of sound), obsessions he would pursue over the next 12 years. Eventually he would debunk most of the prevailing wisdom on high-fidelity sound reproduction.

Around the time of the original acoustical disappointment, though, Bose was drafted to teach MIT's intro network-theory class. He reluctantly agreed to try it for two years.

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"Teaching," he says, "has never been a priority at MIT; it's mostly lip service. With a few very notable exceptions, the priorities are writing papers and making tenure. There were professors who had an enormous influence on me, but it wasn't in the subjects they taught. The benefit came through conversations in which they conveyed their way of thinking. That was what I wanted to give to my students: I wanted to teach thought, not formulas."

Bose threw away the syllabus he was given-"it was more suitable for a technician's training"-and hauled nine blackboards into his classroom. He drafted a cadre of professors and teaching assistants to lead recitation sessions and encouraged students to ask tough questions. He urged section leaders to "think out loud," to illustrate the problem-solving process. He abolished exam time limits and allowed open books.

Bose soon gained something of a cult following among students. Despite a hefty homework commitment of 18 to 20 hours a week, Bose's engineering classes-one was described as "Life 101" by a student course-review guide-ultimately drew mathematicians, physicists, biologists and students from all disciplines at the university. William R. Brody, now the president of Johns Hopkins University, took Bose's class as an undergraduate in 1962. "He would walk into a lecture to 350 students, and you could hear a pin drop," Brody recalls. "He
commanded a lot of respect, because of the force of his intellect and his total dedication to the students. His class gave me the courage to tackle high-risk problems; it equipped me with
the problem-solving skills I needed to be successful in several careers. Amar Bose taught me how to think."

As Bose developed as a teacher, he continued to devote energy to electronics research, laying the groundwork for new efficiencies in power processing. In 1964 one of Bose's mentors, Y.W. Lee, called Bose into his office. Yee had been trapped in Shanghai during World War II and had survived by prospecting for artifacts and curios.

"I have a two-part dream I would like to tell you about," Lee said. "It is a dream that every curio dealer has. The first part of the dream is that one day he will go into the hills and an object will come into his hands. The second part is that he will recognize the value of this object and not let it pass through his fingers."

"The genius of Lee," Bose says, "is that he would give you two plus two, and let you discover four. I spent a few days thinking about it, and I finally realized that he was telling me to form a company, to develop some of the applications and patents that we had been working on." And so he formed the Bose Corporation. A contract to develop power-regulating systems for military jets provided an early revenue stream (today Bose systems regulate the electric power on many commercial jets), which was poured into additional research and development.

"I knew better than to tell him what I thought, because the more people say it can't be done, the more excited he gets."
In 1966, encouraged by his years of late-night acoustics research suggesting that the role of reflected sound had been overlooked, Bose introduced a speaker that used multiple small loudspeakers to take advantage of the fact that 80 to 90 percent of sound from a speaker radiates backward. The system did away with woofers and tweeters and incorporated an active equalizer. To work correctly, the speakers had to be placed in the corners of the room.

"To the hi-fi world, it was blasphemy," Bose says. "They sounded great, but people had their preconceptions, and the reasoning behind our speakers was too hard to explain."

The first speakers were a flop. But Bose's reputation grew with the introduction of the second-generation Bose 901 speakers, followed by the 301 speakers and the Wave Radio, which the company introduced after 14 years of R&D. In 1978, on a flight from Zurich, Bose hit on the idea for noise-canceling headphones-and managed to work out the essential equations by the time he landed. And in 1982, drawn by the possibilities for high-quality audio in cars, he teamed up with ACDelco to develop custom-configured sound systems for particular models.

As the company grew, Bose kept looking outward, excited by the opportunities he saw all around him. His son, Vanu, remembers driving in a rainstorm with his father, who squinted through a windshield streaked by poorly performing wipers. "Most people would just complain about how the wipers don't work right," Vanu says, "but he was analyzing why they didn't work and thinking out loud about how to make them better. A few weeks later I saw on his desk a patent application for a new design for windshield wipers. It was only later that I realized that not everyone is always looking for ways to do things better."

As we continue on our rambling drive, Bose stops the car often to investigate whatever piques his curiosity: hang-gliders stunt-flying over a canyon, teenage boogie-boarders slicing through eight-foot waves, a particularly beautiful beach. His sense of wonder is earnest, and as we explore the island together, I find it reassuring that a person can retain this sort of innocence and optimism and not only survive, but thrive.

More than anything, Bose's intense curiosity reminds me of my 15-month-old son. Yet Bose's attention span is anything but childlike. How many corporate leaders these days have the
patience to sustain a speculative research project for 24 years? "That's a big problem now in this country," Bose says. "The average automotive CEO stays on the job for only 4.7 years, so he is not likely to invest money in long-term research. The consequence is that this country, which should be on the frontiers of research, is losing its technological leadership."

Bose says that his best ideas usually come to him in a flash. "These innovations are not the result of rational thought; it's an intuitive idea. But if it's a sophisticated idea, then you need to apply all the rational tools to determine whether, and how, it can be done." The Bose Suspension System was, to say the least, a sophisticated idea. Vice president Bob Maresca remembers the day, in 1986, when Bose told him about the then-secret project, which was code-named Project Sound.

"Amar was very excited," Maresca says. "He said a car with this suspension could corner as well as any racecar, but it would have a smoother ride than any luxury car. He said it could crouch down and leap like a leopard, then it would put its paws out and accept the landing. I thought, 'What an intriguing and exciting fantasy-but impossible, of course.' I knew better than to tell him what I thought, because the more people say it can't be done, the more excited he gets."

Having identified the huge divide between what was available and what was theoretically possible, Bose's suspension team took on the challenge of designing high-speed linear motors, control algorithms and high-efficiency amplifiers. They bet that the computer industry would make sufficient strides on their fourth essential item, high-speed processing. They began testing designs and software, and by 1989, they had developed a prototype that was ready to be road-tested.

"The future isn't in solving the problems to which we already know the answers. It's in learning how to work through the problems you'll experience in life."
At its heart are linear electromagnetic motors installed at each wheel in place of traditional shock absorbers. Power amplifiers-based on technologies Bose pioneered at MIT-deliver electricity to the motors in response to signals from the control algorithms. The motors move so quickly and forcefully that they can extend downward to roll the tire through a deep rut and then retract fast enough that the car's occupants perceive nothing more than a mild stirring. On the far side of the pothole, the motor operates as a generator, so the suspension requires less than a third the power of a typical car air-conditioning system.

In August I previewed the suspension system at Bose headquarters in Framingham, Massachusetts. In a Lexus LS400 atop a ride simulator, I bounced around on a facsimile of a terribly rutted cobblestone road as it would feel with a conventional high-end suspension. Next, in Bose mode, the car took on the same mangled road, but inside I felt only subtle vibrations. Looking at a mirror on the wall of the garage, I could see the Lexus's tires bouncing insanely, as if they belonged to another car.

Later I watched a film of two test drivers taking a basic LS400 and a Bose-retrofitted LS400 through a series of side-by-side tests. In a double-lane-change maneuver, a bumps course and deep cornering, the Bose-equipped Lexus remained completely flat, with no hint of body pitch or roll.

At the end of the film, the Bose Lexus accelerated toward a curb. The car crouched down and leaped like a leopard, hurdling over the obstruction. As it descended, it extended its "paws"-the wheels-out to accept the landing. The driver got out and bowed. Next to him, the empty car bowed too.

"The future," Bose famously told his students, "isn't in solving the problems to which we already know the answers. It's in learning how to work through the problems you'll experience in life, in any subject."

In 1983 engineering graduate student Ken Jacob enrolled in Bose's acoustics class during his final semester at MIT. As a teenager, Jacob was one of many audiophiles who had bought black-market kits to build pirated copies of the pricey Bose 901 speakers, and at MIT he had heard the buzz about Bose's teaching. After his coursework was finished, Jacob was planning to design sound for Broadway productions.

"Within 20 minutes of the start of that first lecture," Jacob says, "all my plans had changed. Professor Bose connected everything I had learned and put all the pieces together. I said, 'I've got to work for this guy.'"

Jacob would go on to become the director and chief engineer of Bose's Live Music Technology Group, which in 1994 unveiled the Bose Auditioner program, a software tool that allows acoustic engineers to hear precisely what a proposed audio system will sound like from any seat in a large venue even before building construction begins. The program has been used to design public address systems at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the Sistine Chapel, and even Masjid al-Haram, the grand mosque at Mecca, a challenging environment, full of reverberating marble, with a history of failed audio solutions.

On the day that Jacob unveiled the project, Bose admitted that he hadn't expected it to succeed. "He let me work on that with a team of five engineers for 10 years-most of the time thinking that it was impossible," Jacob told me, shaking his head in disbelief. When I repeat Jacob's quote to Bose, he grins. "I thought the computational power wouldn't be there," he says. "But the problem was tough enough and the team was talented enough that I thought their research would yield something good. Besides, Ken was so passionate about his idea that I couldn't bring myself to hold him back."

When we stop for some ice cream, I ask Bose how he accounts for the impact he has had on such diverse fields. He tells me that he once asked his mentor, the brilliant mathematician Norbert Wiener, the same question. "We were walking through the courtyard, and he stopped and turned toward me, and said two words: 'Insatiable curiosity.' "

Perhaps not surprisingly, something as straightforward as creating a mission statement can be difficult at a company whose core value seems to be inquisitiveness. "Amar doesn't like to be narrowly defined," says Joe Veranth, Bose vice president of research and development. "He'll say, 'How do we know we won't be doing this and this and this five years from now? Why should we limit ourselves?' "

The value of Amar Bose isn't so much in the things he has invented, but in the sense of possibility he inspires.
Even the company's consumer slogan-BETTER SOUND THROUGH RESEARCH-appears on the trucks only, Veranth says, "because trucks can be repainted." In the lobby of Bose headquarters, set in stone, is a broader slogan: BETTER PRODUCTS THROUGH RESEARCH.

Even that seems limiting; a somewhat drab, Jetsons-era paean to the redemptive power of products and technology. The value of Amar Bose-and by extension, his company-isn't so much in the things he has invented, but in the sense of possibility he inspires. Bose reminds us that we could all afford to be much more skyward-looking, far-fetched and curious, and
that we could all believe more strongly in our own potential to create.

When we jump back in the Cadillac and continue careening along the Hawaiian coast, I ask Bose about the suspension system's market potential. He says he has no clue. "It will be expensive. But we know that we have a technology that's so different and so much better that just about anyone who tries it will want it."

In the automotive world, there's not much that is more fundamental than the interface between a car's body and the road's surface. But now that Bose has mastered suspension, what is the next big unsolved problem with cars?

Bose laughs big when he hears the question, and I realize that for the first time today, I'm not going to get an answer. I watch his eyes for clues, but I see only a glimmer, a trace of the spark of genius and mischief converging. He grins, clearly satisfied with himself, and keeps his gaze fast on the road ahead.

"We're working on it," he says.

Click here to see this story as it originally appeared in the December 2004 issue of Popular Science magazine.

Ah, the joys of womanhood. When the female body decides that baby-making time is over, many women experience hot flashes--the occasional onset of skin redness, sweating, increased heart rate and in general feeling like you've just been teleported onto the sun's surface. Yet scientists don't really know what actually causes women to have hot flashes during menopause, or how the brain responds to them.

A new study from Wayne State University's medical school tries to get at the latter question through in vivo brain scans of women having hot flashes. The researchers claim it's the first study to suggest that hot flashes originate in specific brain regions.

While it's relatively easy to study the way the body responds to external heat stimulation, "hot flashes are unique because they are internally generated, so studying them presents unique challenges," according to Robert Freedman, the study's lead investigator and a professor of behavioral neurosciences and psychiatry.

Twenty postmenopausal women who reported experiencing at least six hot flashes a day were put in an fMRI scanner to identify their neural response to the experience. Because having six or more hot flashes a day wasn't painful enough, the study's subjects "had to lie in the MRI scanner while being heated between two body-size heating pads for up to two hours while we waited for the onset of a hot flash." The researchers then measured their sweat levels to determine when the hot flashes actually occurred. Yikes.

They found that before the hot flash even happened, activity spiked in the brain stem region, where thermal regulation may occur. Once the hot flash started, activity increased in the insula and prefrontal cortex. No significant activity was observed in the hypothalamus, a brain region that has been linked to thermoregulation before, a fact the researchers could not explain and note among their limitations.

This staggered brain response could reflect a difference between the origins of hot flashes and our perception of them. The activation of brain stem regions might be where the hot flash begins functionally, then the later activation of regions like the insula and prefrontal cortex reflects the person becoming conscious of the feeling.

The study is online in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

A TV channel explicitly aimed at canine viewers launched in Israel earlier this year, following a successful launch here in the States. But can dogs actually see what's happening on a TV?

The BBC asked Stanley Coren, professor emeritus in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia and expert on the subject of the dog-human relationship, for help answering that question. (We've previously talked to Coren about domesticated foxes and whether animals dream.) His answer? Sure, dogs can watch TV, but it depends on a few optic factors as well as the temperament of the dog itself.

Refresh rate is the term that's most important here--it refers to the speed at which an image is replaced by the next image on the screen. The first HDTVs had a refresh rate of 60Hz, meaning the screen draws 60 pictures each second. Our eyes can be fooled by about 50Hz, so we see a continuous moving picture. If you drop below that, we start to see flickering, like in a flip-book.

Dogs (and cats, though they're not mentioned in the BBC article) have much sharper eyes than we do; dogs will still see that flicker up until about 75Hz. Luckily, newer TVs have much higher refresh rates, so you can grab a TV with a 120Hz, 240Hz, or even higher refresh rate. That's needed for a dog to identify the picture as moving and not as a series of still images.

Positioning also seems to be important for dogs. They won't pay much attention to TVs that are placed at the eye level of humans, since they're not used to looking up there. TVs for dogs typically have to be placed on the ground for the dog to investigate and watch. And certain shots or styles of video are of more or less interest to dogs, too; videos that are shot low to the ground tend to hold a dog's interest more, as do shots of animals (but not cartoon animals).

Helpful tips if you want your dog to share your interests! "Have a seat, Barkley. Game of Thrones is on." Truly man's best friend.

[BBC]

We've seen a lot of changes in gay marriage in the U.S. recently, both in law and in culture. Here's another, more fundamental, place where rules and attitudes seem to be changing. Gay-rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign published its annual analysis of American healthcare facilities last week and found that a greater number than ever have top-notch policies in place to protect gay patients and employees.

Last year, the campaign found only 71 hospitals or hospital groups-which represent several facilities-had strong non-discrimination policies in place for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients and employees. This year, 212 groups had strong policies, out of 309 groups that responded to the campaign's survey. (Last year, 122 groups responded to the survey.)

There aren't really comprehensive nationwide studies of the health of different LGBT groups-the Institute of Medicine is working on it-but some preliminary evidence suggests non-heterosexual people get certain diseases more often and are less likely to get certain screening tests. Many LGBT people also feel they don't receive equal treatment from doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers. In a 2010 survey, 9 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual people and 52 percent of transgender people said they believed some would refuse them medical care because of their sexuality. Explicit non-discrimination policies could help make LGBT people more comfortable seeking health care and reduce disparities in their health.

To get a top rating from the Human Rights Campaign, a health care facility has to: have a written non-discrimination policy for patients and employees that addresses both "sexual orientation" and "gender identity"; guarantee equal visitation rights for LGBT patients; and train its staff to care for LGBT patients. The campaign asks facilities for documents to prove they have and publicize their LGBT policies. The advocacy group also provides free staff training in LGBT issues, although facilities still get credit if they choose to get training from another company instead.

One of the biggest shifts this year is that many more facilities were willing to participate in the Human Rights Campaign's survey at all. For the first time since the campaign began doing this survey in 2007, at least one facility responded from every American state. A large majority of U.S. Veterans Health Administration facilities participated in the survey this year. Last year, only one veterans' health center responded. Among the veterans' centers that replied, 76 percent of those were rated tops.

Many more facilities also added gender identity to their discrimination policies this year. Eighty-seven percent of facilities that took the survey had transgender-protective patient policies. That's still less than the number that have sexual orientation-protective patient policies, 93 percent.

Head-up display systems have been around for decades but despite their added safety (by allowing you to keep your eyes on the road) you still won't find it a standard feature in many cars. If you've bought a car and discovered that it didn't have a head-up display, there are a growing number of affordable aftermarket kits available.

Navigation specialist Garmin is the latest to release a simple head-up display system, which is portable so can be used in multiple cars.

The Garmin unit receives navigation information from a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone running a Garmin StreetPilot1 or NAVIGON app. By attaching it to your vehicle's dash, this information can be projected onto a transparent film on the windshield or an attached reflector lens. The brightness is automatically adjusted depending on ambient conditions so projections are clearly visible in direct sunlight or at night.

Garmin boasts that its head-up display offers more navigation details than other portable head-up displays, yet presents them in a simplified way that doesn't divert the driver's attention from the road. The information includes turn arrows, distance to the next turn, current speed and speed limit, as well as estimated time of arrival. It even lets drivers know what lane to be in for the next maneuver and alerts them when they exceed the speed limit. It also warns users of potential traffic delays and upcoming safety camera locations.

The Garmin head-up display is priced at $129.99, though you'll also need to download either the Garmin StreetPilot1 or NAVIGON app, which start at $29.99.

This article, written by Viknesh Vijayenthiran, was originally published on Motor Authority, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow Motor Authority on Facebook and Twitter.

Earlier today, NASA announced the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a brand new moon in the solar system, a dim satellite only 12 miles across, orbiting Neptune. As with any newborn, it needs a name. How will astronomers decide what to call it?

Right now, the moon's tag is S/2004 N1. It's a bit of a mouthful to toss out in casual conversation, but it signifies that it's the first satellite discovered in 2004 around Neptune. (Though only identified this month, the moon was discovered through archival images of Neptune taken by Hubble between 2004 and 2009.)

Eventually, N1 will have a more noble title bestowed on it, probably something plucked from classical mythology.

The discoverer of the moon gets to suggest a name, but the final say on moon-naming goes to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a group of astronomers first called together in 1919 to bring order to the chaos of celestial nomenclature. Usually a natural satellite's name is somehow related to that of the planet it orbits. Jupiter, for instance, has moons that are named after the god's lovers.

Just a few weeks ago, the latest moons discovered hanging out with dwarf planet Pluto got a moniker upgrade of their own. Formerly known as P4 and P5, the moons, discovered in 2011 and 2012, have now become Kerberos and Styx, named for two figures of the underworld in Greek mythology.

The IAU put its foot down when it came to naming one of them Vulcan--the most popular name in a Trekkie-centric public poll--because it already refers to a planet once proposed to exist between Mercury and the Sun. Plus, it deviated from the underworld theme Pluto had going on.

N1 was found by the SETI Institute's Mark Showalter, the same astronomer that discovered Kerberos and Styx and opened up their names to public polling. NASA hasn't announced whether we'll get the same opportunity with this new moon. At this rate, it even might be a year or two before N1 gets a fun new name. Start digging up obscure, Neptune-related myths!

Perhaps the young Tyrannosaurus rex hadn't yet grown enough-either in size or in wile-to bring down the duck-billed dinosaur?

A team of U.S. paleontologists have discovered a fossil of a piece of a hadrosaur tail that includes two vertebrae that have healed around a tooth crown. The story they've pieced together is kind of exciting: They think an immature T. rex came for Mr. Hadro and bit his tail, but then lost out on the prey. The hadrosaur lived long enough after the encounter at least for its tail to heal.

The tail and its embedded tooth mean something pretty exciting for paleontology, too. It's the first hard evidence that T. rexes actively hunted prey, the paleontologists wrote in a paper they published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previously, paleontologists had only suggestive evidence, such as the apparent strength of T. rex jaws.

This team believes that like many modern predators, T. rexes scavenged some of the time, but also hunted. That doesn't seem to be an uncommon view.

The hadrosaur fossil has a few things going for it as a snapshot of T. rex hunting. The healing around the embedded tooth shows that the T. rex chomped down on the hadrosaur while the latter was still alive, instead of scavenging its corpse after it died. Previously, scientists had discovered fossils with T. rex bite marks or even lodged-in T. rex teeth, but without evidence of healing, there was no way to know whether the bites came before or after the prey died.

It also helps that the fossil includes the T. rex's actual tooth crown, instead of just a tooth mark, which would be much more difficult to identify. The tooth is indistinguishable from other teeth paleontologists have found belonging to young T. rexes that aren't quite adults yet, the PNAS researchers wrote.

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At the afterparty for Microsoft's Imagine Cup, a worldwide student technology competition, some of the smartest students in the world are singing "Like a Virgin." One of them begs me to get him a beer; the line is impossibly long and I've finally reached the front. But really, you can't blame them for wanting to unwind. It's been a long week in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the students have largely neglected the sights in favor of long nights of coding and honing their business pitches.

It all culminated on Thursday, in the Alexandrinsky Theatre, at the lengthy and lavish awards ceremony hosted by the Doctor himself-Matt Smith of Doctor Who fame, so chosen because "we wanted someone who would embody the Imagine Cup qualities of creativity, ingenuity and a lot of last minute running about," says John Scott Tynes, the Imagine Cup competition manager. Several teams walked away with cash prizes ranging from $3,000 to $50,000 to grow their businesses and improve their inventions. Winniers included a quick blood type test, an app that syncs music playback on your phone, and a social network for nonprofits and volunteers.

"We're giving people a platform to showcase their idea and it seems to me that [considering] the quality of some of the ideas, if you weren't to invest a little more in the research and the development, it would be a real shame," Smith says.

Though there are approximately one million smaller awards and challenges that students compete for at the Imagine Cup, the main three categories are Games, World Citizenship and Innovation, the only real difference between the latter two being that World Citizenship projects are supposed to be altruistic and the Innovation ones don't have to be (though they still sometimes are). The winner of the World Citizenship competition devised a tool that lets you quickly and easily test for blood types. The winning team in the Innovation competition created an app called soundSYNK that lets you sync up smartphones to play music simultaneously.

The focus of the Imagine Cup has shifted somewhat from pastyears when it really emphasized using technology to solve the world's problems. There's plenty of that remaining, but it seems that the competition is embracing inventiveness in all its forms, including projects that are really just for fun. There's space for a game called "Piggy Spanker," which is pretty much what it sounds like, to be in the same room as an app that diagnoses malaria.

Students are encouraged to treat their projects like startups--to come up with business plans and think not only about what their projects could theoretically achieve, but how to actually make them a reality. As Microsoft Corporate Vice President Steve Guggenheimer reminded the attendees at the awards ceremony, "Microsoft is a student-run startup...my hope for all of you is that you end up in the same place someday." That never seemed to be far from the students' minds. They are consummate salespeople, walking the floors during showcases, pulling you aside and asking "Have you heard about our project?"

I saw some amazing ideas at these showcases, both from teams that won and teams that didn't, from all over the world. Team MaskedNinjas from Egypt created an app that turns a newspaper into a Harry Potter-esque experience, scanning text and bringing up relevant videos to enhance your reading. It isn't magic though, just an algorithm.

Team M1R from Spain, which is really just one guy, Sergio Rivas Gomez, created one of the craziest projects I've ever seen at any Imagine Cup-an augmented reality helmet that has 3-D vision and responds to the movement of the wearer's eyes, and her brain waves. When I wore it, and looked at a piece of paper with Russian text on it, the helmet translated it, displaying the text in English right below. It's like Google Glass, except that, in Gomez's view, it could do everything from give surgeons super-vision to create more immersive video games. "If he doesn't win something, I'll eat my hat," I thought, because I actually think things like that. But he didn't, so I guess I have to. It just goes to show how steep the competition is. As Matt Smith put it, "I was completely astounded by the level of some of these projects,.I was expecting, like, volcanoes that blow up and stuff."

Volcanoes they are not. The projects use cutting-edge technology, mostly Microsoft's, of course-these teams know which side of the bread their butter is on. But many of the app developers acknowledge the reality of the market and plan to roll out their products for Apple and Android technology too, in the future. Unlike a normal science fair, when these students pack up and go home, it's hardly over. All of them are eager to tell me what's next, what they're improving for the next version, what business they're going to talk to for funding. So it may not be long before we're writing about some of these students again.

Airship development tends to come in waves, the most recent of which arrived in the mid-2000s. Facing two wars and a need for new surveillance and logistics craft, the Pentagon undertook a flurry of airship development. The Navy was first, with the MZ-3A, a technology testbed. The Air Force and Army followed, with their Blue Devil and Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) programs. Both ships were about as long as a football field and capable of flying for weeks. But then the bottom fell out. The financial crisis hit (bad), the wars began to wind down (good), and a helium shortage struck (expensive). In June 2012, Blue Devil lost funding. Eight months later, the LEMV got the ax too. The MZ-3A is still flying, but its funding is on the chopping block. If there was an airship renaissance in the making, alas, it has come down to Earth.

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

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a brainwave-measuring device to help diagnose kids with ADHD, a first for the disorder.

The device detects two different types of brainwaves, theta and beta, and how frequently they occur. Kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder have more theta than beta brainwaves, compared to kids without ADHD.

The FDA approved the device, called the Neuropsychiatric Electroencephalogram-Based Assessment Aid or NEBA, for use with a full medical exam. In a statement, the director of the agency's Office of Device Evaluation, Christy Foreman, emphasized that the device has to work with other clinical measures.

To get their FDA approval, NEBA's creators performed a study with 275 kids with attention problems. The study, which the FDA didn't make public, found that adding a 20-minute NEBA test to standard diagnostic procedures helped doctors diagnose ADHD more accurately.

ADHD is one of the most common childhood disorders in the U.S., according to the FDA. Nine percent of adolescents have it. On average, kids are first diagnosed at age 7.

One clinical psychologist the New York Times talked with worried the test would make diagnoses more expensive, without making them much more accurate. Without the FDA's study data, it's difficult to know exactly how much better a NEBA-aided diagnosis is compared with a standard diagnosis.

Before NEBA's approval, doctors generally used brainwave measures to diagnose seizures, head injuries and tumors.

[U.S. Food and Drug Administration]

We've seen metabolism maps before, but never one quite so simple to read as this one, designed by Richard Wheeler, an illustrator and Oxford postdoc who researches the cell biology of parasites.

Metabolism encompasses all the chemical reactions necessary for your body to keep running, including turning food into energy and creating amino acids and the chemical bases for DNA. Researchers are especially interested in how these chemical processes interact, as metabolism plays a vital role in disease and how our bodies respond to drug treatments.

Here, the "subway" lines are metabolic pathways, labelled in the box in the bottom right hand corner. The pathways trace how one chemical is transformed into another chemical, catalyzed by a series of enzymes. It's not a comprehensive illustration of every chemical reaction involved in metabolism, but it helps you get the idea.

You can get a poster here, and check out more of Wheeler's work on his deviantART site and website.

[Visual.ly]

If you put a steamy cup of coffee in the refrigerator, it wouldn't immediately turn cold. Likewise, if the sun simply "turned off" (which is actually physically impossible), the Earth would stay warm-at least compared with the space surrounding it-for a few million years. But we surface dwellers would feel the chill much sooner than that.

Within a week, the average global surface temperature would drop below 0°F. In a year, it would dip to -100°. The top layers of the oceans would freeze over, but in an apocalyptic irony, that ice would insulate the deep water below and prevent the oceans from freezing solid for hundreds of thousands of years. Millions of years after that, our planet would reach a stable -400°, the temperature at which the heat radiating from the planet's core would equal the heat that the Earth radiates into space, explains David Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.

Although some microorganisms living in the Earth's crust would survive, the majority of life would enjoy only a brief post-sun existence. Photosynthesis would halt immediately, and most plants would die in a few weeks. Large trees, however, could survive for several decades, thanks to slow metabolism and substantial sugar stores. With the food chain's bottom tier knocked out, most animals would die off quickly, but scavengers picking over the dead remains could last until the cold killed them.

Humans could live in submarines in the deepest and warmest parts of the ocean, but a more attractive option might be nuclear- or geothermal-powered habitats. One good place to camp out: Iceland. The island nation already heats 87 percent of its homes using geothermal energy, and, says astronomy professor Eric Blackman of the University of Rochester, people could continue harnessing volcanic heat for hundreds of years.

Of course, the sun doesn't merely heat the Earth; it also keeps the planet in orbit. If its mass suddenly disappeared (this is equally impossible, by the way), the planet would fly off, like a ball swung on a string and suddenly let go.

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Popular Science magazine.-Eds.

Thirty Three from Nils Völker on Vimeo.

Berlin-based media artist Nils Völker has a passion for cushions. Völker's work often features pillowy sculptures with custom electronics that allow them to undulate and move like waves. "Thirty Three," his latest solo exhibition installed in the Eglise du Vieux St-Sauveur, an 11th century church in Caen, France, is no exception.

The crinkly metallic cushions move with the tides in the harbor of Le Havre, France, the same harbor depicted in Claude Monet's famous Impression, Sunrise. Every six hours or so, when the tide reaches its highest or lowest point, the movement of the cushions slows and restarts in the opposite direction.

Part of this year's water-themed Festival Normandie Impressioniste, "Thirty Three" will run until September 1.

See more of how the exhibition was put together here.