A dead pig is a good proxy for a dead person: It's roughly the size of a human torso, it has no fur, and its gut holds similar bacteria. These parallels mean that injury and decay are comparable in the two species, which can help forensic pathologists learn more about how corpses behave. On land, this dark research is easy-place the pig somewhere, and watch it rot. But what about bodies at sea? When a corpse turns up in a marine environment, whether as a result of murder, accident, or tsunami, coroners and pathologists don't have the information they need to determine even the time of death.

In 2000, forensics researcher Gail Anderson, of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, was the first to simulate a marine grave; she sent divers to place pig carcasses underwater and chronicled the decay that followed, as crabs, shrimp, and sea lice devoured them. Then, in 2006, Anderson began conducting research with Venus, a cabled ocean observatory that broadcasts underwater views of offshore British Columbia live over the Internet. The researchers used a remotely operated vehicle to plunk a pig in view of a camera, which recorded the action as sea life destroyed it. Twenty-two pigs later-and with more scheduled for this fall-Anderson's team is learning how to tell whether a body decayed on a sandy or rocky surface, whether it came from fresh- or saltwater, and whether its wounds are from a knife or a crab.

The work is already paying off. After several human feet clad in athletic shoes started washing up on Vancouver's shores in 2007, Anderson quashed speculation that a serial killer was lopping them off. The cause of death still isn't clear, but we now know that sea life snipped away enough tissue that the feet fell off on their own.

1. Information Superhighway

A two-ton node-basically a large waterproof Ethernet hub-connects the experimental setup to a 1.5-inch cable, which provides power and transmits video, photos, and data over the Internet for scientists and the public to check out.

2. Hog-Tied

Two pigs are tethered to an instrument platform to keep sea critters from dragging them out of camera range. One sits in the most natural setting possible, while a backup is encased in a cage-a feature added after an experiment was largely ruined by hungry six-gilled sharks.

3. Briny Bot

The deep-sea vehicle Ropos (remotely operated platform for ocean sciences) delivers the pigs and their instrument platform to a node and plugs in a webcam and sensors with dexterous arms. When the experiment ends, Ropos swims back, unplugs everything, and brings the remains and the platform back to its mothership.

4. Lights, Camera, Action

The experiments run hundreds of feet underwater, where it is pitch black. In order to capture the pigs' decomposition on video, four lights flash on for a few minutes every quarter hour (constant light would scare away too many animals, changing how the pigs decay). The high-definition camera can be panned or tilted remotely.

5. Devices, Dunked

A set of sensors measures the water's temperature, salinity, and oxygen concentration, all of which could impact how the pigs decompose.

6. Bacon On The Side

The platform's bottom is plastic mesh, which lets silt microbes eat away at the pigs while collecting the bones for later study (by Lynne Bell, a forensics anthropologist at Simon Fraser University).

Sea lice mob devours pig from the inside outSandrine Ceurstemont, editorNew Scientist TV

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

The final frontier smells a lot like a Nascar race-a bouquet of hot metal, diesel fumes and barbecue. The source? Dying stars, mostly.

The by-products of all this rampant combustion are smelly compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These molecules "seem to be all over the universe," says Louis Allamandola, the founder and director of the Astrophysics and Astrochemistry Lab at NASA Ames Research Center. "And they float around forever," appearing in comets, meteors and space dust. These hydrocarbons have even been shortlisted for the basis of the earliest forms of life on Earth. Not surprisingly, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can be found in coal, oil and even food.

Though a pure, unadulterated whiff of outer space is impossible for humans (it's a vacuum after all; we would die if we tried), when astronauts are outside the ISS, space-borne compounds adhere to their suits and hitch a ride back into the station. Astronauts have reported smelling "burned" or "fried" steak after a space walk, and they aren't just dreaming of a home-cooked meal.

The smell of space is so distinct that, three years ago, NASA reached out to Steven Pearce of the fragrance maker Omega Ingredients to re-create the odor for its training simulations. "Recently we did the smell of the moon," Pearce says. "Astronauts compared it to spent gunpowder."

Allamandola explains that our solar system is particularly pungent because it is rich in carbon and low in oxygen, and "just like a car, if you starve it of oxygen you start to see black soot and get a foul smell." Oxygen-rich stars, however, have aromas reminiscent of a charcoal grill. Once you leave our galaxy, the smells can get really interesting. In dark pockets of the universe, molecular clouds full of tiny dust particles host a veritable smorgasbord of odors, from wafts of sweet sugar to the rotten-egg stench of sulfur.

This article originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of Popular Science magazine.

The X-47B autonomous aircraft made history last week, successfully landing on the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush. Twice. Then things went awry. A third aircraft carrier landing attempt that same day was aborted, and on Monday a fourth and final aircraft carrier landing was halted before it could even be attempted. The future of naval aviation isn't ready for the future just yet.

What happened? The first failure was a computer error, detected by the X-47B itself, which the machine caught before attempting the landing. The aircraft's three navigational computers couldn't all agree on the right course of action, so they decided the X-47B couldn't land safely on the carrier. The X-47B then checked in with the humans in charge, and plotted a course to a safer landing (on land). The second and more recent failure--on a separate X-47B aircraft--is attributed to unspecified technical issues while flying out to the aircraft carrier.

The two X-47Bs, awesomely named Salty Dog 501 & 502 (possibly after the delicious drink?) are set to retire soon. The two completed landings show that the technology has tremendous potential for the future. Tomorrow's autonomous aircraft, informed by research conducted in the X-47B program, will fly ahead and scout for carrier fleets, for up to a day at a time, and finally return safely to refuel before doing it again.

The two aborted landings, more than anything else, show that a brand-new experimental technology is not yet ready for prime time. If the X-47B were a military aircraft about to be pressed into service, this would be a problem. But the X-47B is a technological testbed, whose failures teach researchers just as much as the successes.

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies make it rain on doctors, hospitals and even medical students on the regular. Members of the pharmaceutical industry promote their companies and drugs through things like free meals, travel compensation and all kinds of gifts, which studies have shown can affect the way doctors prescribe drugs.

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, says that drug and medical equipment manufacturers whose products are covered by federal insurance programs must report financial transactions between their companies and doctors or teaching hospitals. A couple states already require pharmaceutical and medical device companies to disclose certain kinds of spending, but this will take it to a federal level.

Starting August 1, manufacturers will have to start collecting information about any payments over $10 made to physicians or teaching hospitals, including gifts, compensation for travel or conferences, consulting fees, research funding, royalties and more. By next fall, the public will have access to that information through an online database.

Read the full act here.

[via Stanford School of Medicine]

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, who previous founded MIT's Media Lab, founded One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which works with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to deliver low-cost laptops to children in developing nations. But this week, OLPC announced something a little bit different.

The first OLPC device, the XO-1, is a bright green, very small, low-powered Linux machine with lots of adjustments for life as a UN-distributed gift. It's sturdy, it has excessively large and powerful Wi-Fi antennae for connecting to networks that may not be nearby, it has a significant anti-theft system built-in, and all its other components are as low-cost as possible. It uses an operating system custom-designed for the device, a twist on the Fedora distro of Linux called Sugar--a UI skin, basically--which sharply limits what the laptop could do. It can browse the internet, word process, chat, play games, and there are a few creative tools like a music creator and a beginner's programming guide. The project aimed to sell the laptop for $100; it never did, partly because that $100 mark wasn't based on an actual budget of parts and labor, but was merely a nice small round number (the BBC estimated it never even broke the $200 mark) and soon ran into distribution problems.

Fast forward seven years, and today, OLPC is announcing a very different product: a $150 Android-based tablet for kids. Not specifically kids in developing nations, either; it's being sold in Walmart here in the States. If you didn't know the bright green XO tablet pictured above was created by a philanthropic organization that usually works with the United Nations, you'd think you were just looking at another cheap tablet for kids who have been begging for a tablet but whose parents don't want to spend $330 on an iPad Mini.

The XO tablet looks a little funky, with its bulbous green rubber case designed by Yves Behar, noted designer of weird-looking gadgetry, but it's actually a fairly unambitious little tablet. It's a 7-inch tablet manufactured by Vivitar, a former photographic powerhouse that was bought by a company called Sakar about five years ago and now makes ultra-cheap digital cameras and tablets. The XO tablet runs a modified version of Android 4.2 specifically designed for kids, but it's compatible with all Android apps. It has a 1.4GHz processor (totally standard and unexceptional), has 4GB of storage (quite small), front- and rear-facing cameras (standard again), and, considering it is probably the same hardware as Vivitar's Camelio tablet, which was announced at the same time, the screen probably has a standard 1,024 x 600 resolution.

The only unusual aspects of the XO tablet, the only things that set it apart from the dozens upon dozens of cheap, anonymous Android tablets from Vivitar and Coby and Archos and Hisense (and more), are that it has a goofy-looking case, it's bilingual (you can switch between Spanish and English with the push of a button), and it has a custom-made interface designed for kids.

The interface is the most telling aspect of the whole affair. Whereas the XO-1 laptop was designed from the ground up for developing nations, the XO tablet is very much for middle-class western kids. The homescreen looks like an array of apps, but you're given the prompt "I want to be a..." and then each of the circular icons gives a game or application that encourages that career path. And some of those careers are not exactly options for developing nations. In this late 2012 Der Spiegel story, kids in Ethiopia are given a few OLPC XO-1 laptops and genuinely love them; they learn to read and write, for example, even though their town in the Ethiopian highlands does not have a school.

At the end of the article, one girl says her dream is to become a truck driver, so she can transport her father's potato crop from the farm to the city. Her father is impressed, if disconcerted, that this girl has such ambitions.

Now compare that to the XO tablet. The app asks what kids want to be, but the answers are heavily slanted toward western kids; options include "astronaut," "musician," "artist," and "mathematician." The apps themselves simply teach kids about space, music, art, and math, to name a few, and give them the ability to create art and explore the internet. (The tablet also includes about 200 books.) Giulia D'Amico, Vice President of Business Development at One Laptop Per Child, told me that there will actually be localized versions of the XO tablet for each market; the Cambodian version will presumably not have the astronaut option, since Cambodia doesn't have a space program. (It does have this, though.) "Each country will have different apps," D'Amico says. But OLPC is billing the XO tablet's apps as "aspirational." Will the Ethiopian version have "truck driver" as an app? What would it teach?

The only localized model we know about right now is the American one. But if the aim is truly to give internet access and education to those who have no access to it, why are they bothering with a $150 tablet to be sold in Walmart? American internet and library access isn't at the same level of coverage as South Korea or Japan, but it's certainly near the top of the heap. And Walmart sells tablets very similar to the XO for sometimes as little as $50. So what's the charitable angle in selling a mid-priced Android tablet to kids who can afford it?

D'Amico says that OLPC remains a non-profit, and that the company's earnings from the XO tablet will go entirely toward providing tablets and laptops to developing nations. But she refused to tell me exactly how much OLPC was even making from the XO tablet, after Vivitar and Walmart had gotten their cuts. Vivitar and Walmart, of course, aren't in this to educate kids. They're in it for the money. And the profit margins on cheap Android tablets are pretty slim already; OLPC isn't going to fund a charitable empire with the earnings from this thing. I do not, frankly, understand why they're releasing a kid's educational tablet in the States; I assume Vivitar thinks it can make a profit by attaching the fancy design and prestige of OLPC to its cheap tablets, but I don't see much in it for OLPC.

There's a bigger question, too: is there even a point in making tablets for kids? Android tablets are starting to be very good, and very cheap. The Nexus 7, our favorite Android tablet, is sturdy yet slim, can fit in your back pocket, is super fast and very responsive, and has millions of apps and great support from Google. Its cheapest model has a Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, a quad-core chip that destroys the 1.4GHz chip in the XO tablet. The Nexus 7 also has 16GB of storage (four times that of the XO), a 1,280 x 800 resolution screen (sharper and clearer than the XO), and it's smaller and lighter than the XO to boot.

The Nexus 7 also costs $200. That's only $50 more than the XO tablet. The only real benefit the XO has is its interface, which is not nearly as beneficial as the OLPC folks think. This GeekDad article gave a Vinci tablet, a similar Android "edutainment" device, to kids of a few different ages, and found that by the age of about 9 years old, kids were totally bored with the restrictions on a kid-friendly interface. They want the same tools as adults, the same games, the same access to the internet, the same apps.

The XO tablet is a total change of pace for OLPC; the announcement post on OLPC's site doesn't mention developing nations as a target market for the device at all. Instead it talks about fancy design and parental controls. It's not a do-gooder device: it's a Walmart-bound cheapie kiddie tablet. And those don't really need to exist.

OLPC is a non-profit that planned to change the world, through cutting-edge technology, by connecting its poorest corners. And now it's selling unnecessary gadgetry to middle-class Americans. Has it completely lost its way?

Pirates have hunted it. Monarchs have exploited it. Jewelers have sold it. But where did gold come from?

Research by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) suggests that the Earth's supply of gold originated from collisions of dead stars.

The research is based on recent observations of a nearby gamma-ray burst, GRB 130603B. Gamma-ray bursts are flashes of high-energy light (gamma rays), associated with explosions. Researchers believe GRB 130603B resulted from the collision of two neutron stars--deceased cores of stars that have previously exploded.

In GRB 130603B, researchers observed a burst of light lasting two-tenths of a second, then a glow dominated by infrared light, which radiated from the area for several days. The glow exhibited unusual behavior. Per the press release:

The team believes that significant quantities of various heavy elements, such as gold, were created and suspended within that area.

"We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses--quite a lot of bling!" lead author Edo Berger said in a statement.

Given the frequency of GRBs, Berger and his colleagues hypothesize that all of the universe's gold could have originated from these events.

When the industrious beaver scurries around being its toothy self, cutting down trees and blocking up waterways, it's not just altering the lay of the land; it's out there combating climate change, a few carbon emissions at a time.

When beavers build a dam, impeding the natural flow of water, the river begins to overflow more often, creating a sediment-rich wetland area known as a beaver meadow. A new study from Colorado State University geology professor Ellen Wohl finds that these beaver meadows store carbon, temporarily sequestering greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. With reductions in the beaver population, we're missing out on a whole lot of potential carbon storage.

Between 60 million to 400 million beavers once lived across 60 percent of North America, but European settlers substantially reduced the population through hunting and trapping. When beaver populations relocate and abandon their dams, beaver meadows eventually dry up into grasslands, and the wood and organic matter buried there begins to decompose and release carbon dioxide.

This suggests that beavers play an important role in keeping the ecosystem resilient against climate change, drought and wildfire, the study notes. Wohl found that the abandoned beaver dams she studied made up around 8 percent of the carbon storage in the landscape, and that if beavers were still actively maintaining those dams, the number would be closer to 23 percent. As such, wiping out most of the continent's beaver population during pre-Colonial times probably had quite an impact on the climate.

Beavers: Squirreling away our carbon log by log.

The study appears in Geophysical Research Letters.

[Science via Phys.org]

The Central Intelligence Agency is joining with the National Air and Space Administration, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to spend $630,000 studying a subset of potential global warming solutions. Geo-engineering, as the solutions are broadly termed, is the science of manipulating the environment in a way that mitigates, halts, or otherwise disrupts global warming. It makes sense that three science agencies are examining this, but why the CIA?

Climate change, it turns out, is one of the major threats to national security, as specified in the 2013 "Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community." Climate change threatens food and water supplies, which in turn, could lead to all sorts of geopoliticalconflicts. The intelligence community report singles out droughts in the "Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Niger, Amazon, and Mekong river basins," and notes that increased populations will put intense pressure on (already scare) resources. This doesn't speak to a direct, pressing security threat, but instead thousands of future problems.

Geoengineering, as a way of halting or delaying climate change, is a kind of mad science. One method involves putting sulfur particles into the air to reflect more sunlight, slowing the heating of Earth in much the same way that a gigantic volcanic eruption once cooled the world. Thing is, sulfur particles in the atmosphere also cause acid rain. Directly altering the climate to counteract another human-caused climate alteration is at the very least hubristic. Studying the implications of such geoengineering attempts is the first step toward actually attempting geoengineering, but it is also an important move if geoengineering is to be done responsibly. And it's a far better move than watching rogue individuals attempt scientifically unsound geoeningeering efforts on their own.

Of course, instead of looking to geoengineering, America could always trysensible political action instead. Then again, given international political intransigence on the issue, investing half a million dollars in mad science might be a bargain.

[Mother Jones]

Scientists at Stanford University have managed to build light-absorbers that are thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper. The nanosize structures are capable of absorbing close to 100 percent of visible light emanating from specific wavelengths. The material could be used to make cheaper, more efficient solar cells, among other things, the researchers say.

"Much like a guitar string, which has a resonance frequency that changes when you tune it, metal particles have a resonance frequency that can be fine-tuned to absorb a particular wavelength of light," Carl Hagglund, lead author of the study said in a statement. "We tuned the optical properties of our system to maximize the light absorption."

In order to construct the light-absorbers, ultrathin wafers were coated with trillions of round gold nanodots, essentially small spherical magnets. The wafers contain about 520 billion nanodots per square inch. The wafers were topped with an additional layer of film. The thickness of film determines the specific light frequency the absorber is designed to capture. In testing phases, the prototypes proved capable of absorbing 99 percent of light generated by a wavelength measuring 600 nanometers long.

The previous leading light-absorber technology required a foundational layer that was three times thicker to absorb the same amount of light.

The team believes the light-absorbers have the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency of solar cells. The small size of the structure as a whole forces energy charge carriers closer to one another, meaning it won't take as long for the charge carriers to be collected and stimulate electrical current production. As the structures require less material, they could also make solar cell technology more affordable.

"We are now looking at building structures using ultrathin semiconductor materials that can absorb sunlight," Stacey Bent, co-director of the Stanford Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion (CNEEC) said in the same statement. "These prototypes will then be tested to see how efficiently we can achieve solar energy conversion."

Now, Neill Blomkamp is the acclaimed director of sci-fi flick District 9 and the upcoming Elysium. But not so long ago he was also an artist at visual effects firm The Embassy, which contributed illustrations to Popular Science articles. We've got those here, and also caught up with Blomkamp to get these two pieces of advice on making great science fiction.

CULTIVATE BELIEF

"When I design something, whether it's for a movie or PopSci, I need to believe it can work. If I don't believe it, the audience won't either. What leads to a unified vision is when the director has all those visuals in his head."

TELL REAL STORIES

"Science fiction is just a filter to look at real life. I'm not trying to tell a story that takes place in 2154. Elysium is a rich-and-poor film. A hundred fifty years from now, Earth will probably look a lot like the film: mass poverty, plagues, disease, too many people, and too few resources. And all the crazy life-changing technology will be in concentrated areas of wealth, with armed guards at the gate. What happens then?"

The coast of Western Australia has been particularly dangerous place for shark attacks recent years, earning it the distinction of becoming "shark attack capital of the world." Between October 2011 and July 2012, great white sharks killed five people in attacks in the area.

In response, a company called Shark Attack Mitigation Systems (SAMS) and University of Western Australia scientists have been working to protect swimmers, surfers and divers from getting chomped on with a line of shark-deterring wet suits. After two years of research and development, the suits went on sale this week.

One version, "Elude," camouflages the wearer in the water, based on the recent discovery that sharks seem to be color blind. The other, "Diverter," aims to repel sharks with high-contrast black and white bands, a natural signal the company says tells sharks you aren't the delicious snack they're looking for.

"Many animals in biology are repelled by noxious animals - prey that provide a signal that somehow says ‘Don't eat me' - and that has been manifest in a striped pattern," UWA professor Shaun Collin told the Guardian.

The suits' designs were tested with tiger sharks off the coast of Western Australia, but not with humans inside them. More testing is scheduled for this summer, but the especially brave (or shark-prone) can order a suit now. When you're talking life or limb, $495 isn't that pricey.

[The Guardian]

In the first 26 hours after the verdict acquitting George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Twitter exploded. But how do we figure out the balance of interaction on Twitter? What were people saying, and in what proportion?

The Pew Research Center, a think tank that releases data from surveys (among other things), worked with Crimson Hexagon, a social media analytics company, to comb through millions of tweets about Zimmerman, Martin, Florida, gun laws, race, and fury. Crimson Hexagon looks for patterns in word use to figure out what people are talking about without having to have a human read it all.

The survey found that the most tweets about the verdict were straight news updates, of the "here's what happened" variety. And that makes sense; even if you intended to tweet a dozen times with a point of view, your first reaction could well be a simple announcement of the verdict. And many would tweet nothing else. 39 percent of the tweets surveyed were of that sort. But close behind, at 31 percent, are described as "anger at verdict." About half of those tweets were about the criminal justice system and its various perceived failings, slightly less than half were anti-Zimmerman, and the remaining 2 percent were pro-Martin.

11 percent of the tweets focused on media coverage, which, eeep. Sorry.

Only 7 percent of the tweets surveyed showed support for Zimmerman, though that doesn't include retweets; many news organizations and media types spent awhile retweeting or responding to those who spoke out in favor of the decision, which wouldn't have shown up in the survey.

Check out the full analysis here.

Finland-based company Uniqul is preparing to release a payment system that uses facial recognition software to link a customer with his or her bank account. Instead of swiping a credit card to purchase goods (which is so painfully last-century), now you can just gaze into a camera.

A Uniqul tablet at check-out stations would take the customer's photo as they approach. Within seconds the tablet processes biometrical data to locate the individual's account within the database, which can be registered with any major credit card, Uniqul says. All the customer needs to do is confirm the payment by pressing the "OK" button. The system is supposed to reduce payment transaction time from an average of 30 seconds to less than 5 seconds.

Uniqul claims its service is secured with military-grade algorithms. The fee structure is kind of wonky: For 7 euros a month, you can have access to the payment system anywhere in the world. For 3 euros a month, you get access only within a city of your choice and the nearby suburbs. And for just 1 euro a month, you can use the system within a 1-2 kilometer radios of a point of your choice (say, your home or your office).

Watch the promotional video below.

After riots tore across London in 2011, a team of researchers from University College London began using math to model what happened--and how to predict similar riots in the future. What did they find? Apparently rioting behavior isn't so different from shopping behavior, for one thing.

The math itself is complicated--you can check out the team's published papers on the concept here if you're inclined--but this video provides a few helpful analogies breaking it down. For one, the researchers found that the spread of rioters was similar to the spread of shoppers: rioters tended to stay near where they were when the riots sprang up, in a similar way to how shoppers tend to shop close to home. Since algorithms have already modeled shopping behavior, the same can be done in the future for riots, they say.

Another analogy: in the wild, predators (say, as researcher Hannah Fry does in this video, foxes) will chase down prey (say, rabbits). As the foxes stay in one area, they'll continue hunting rabbits, and the rabbit population will dwindle until the foxes move on. But the longer a rabbit population stays unbothered, the more the population will grow, until the foxes step back in to take them down. This effect's already been modeled, too.

Replace foxes with police and rabbits with rioters and you see a similar effect. The lower the police presence, the more likely rioters are to keep rioting. But when police eventually step in, rioters disperse. Knowing that, the researchers say, math could be used to determine the optimal place to send limited police resources, keeping rioting at a minimum.

But none of that necessarily predicts riots before they happen--and there's not really a way to figure out where they'll start. In the video, Fry explains how youth services were cut from budgets, which hit certain communities the hardest and led to riots. One person--the riots' patient zero--decided to riot, which eventually spread, in a similar way to how diseases do, across the city. That, again, can be modeled, but it seems much more difficult to stop riots in the first place than to combat them after they've already started.

[Nature via Flowing Data]

Shockingly, no major studies have been conducted on this topic. "The implications are, however, profound," says Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland. "Reckless flying, passing out in frosty beer mugs, hitting on crane flies instead of mosquito babes. Frightening!" Fortunately, enough related research exists to make an educated guess.

First, does alcohol affect a mosquito's simple nervous system the way it does creatures with complex brains, such as dogs or Mickey Rourke? In labs, honeybees fly upside-down after alcohol exposure, and inebriated fruit flies have trouble staying upright and fare poorly on learning tests. This suggests that mosquitoes can get tipsy.

Now, how much alcohol does it take to get them schnockered? Scientists routinely puff ethanol vapors at insects and measure their sensitivity with devices called inebriometers. Bugs are no lightweights, often withstanding vapor concentrations of 60 percent alcohol, far more than what's in our blood after a couple beers. "Someone who's had 10 drinks might have a blood alcohol content of 0.2 percent," says entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University. To a mosquito, a blood meal that contains 0.2 percent alcohol is like drinking a beer diluted 25-fold.

Skeeters might have developed this Ruthian ability to hold their liquor through diet. They also feed on fermenting fruit and plants, which contain at least 1 percent alcohol and might have boosted their tolerance. And in a mosquito, alcohol (and any fluid other than blood) is diverted to a "holding pouch," where enzymes break it down before it hits the nervous system.

Before you try to drink a mosquito under the table, heed this warning from Michael Reiskind, an entomologist at Oklahoma State University: The blood alcohol levels required to do so would almost certainly kill you as well.

This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Popular Science magazine.

The viruses that we're most familiar with, like the influenza virus, are small and simple. Influenza is about 100 nanometers across, and has only 13 genes. But scientists are beginning to realize that there's no reason a virus needs to be that small or that simple--and in fact, there are "megaviruses" that can be much, much bigger and more complex than any virus you've seen before.

In a study published today in Science, researchers describe a newly-discovered megavirus that's the largest of its type ever seen. By volume, according to Carl Zimmer at the New York Times, it's 200 times larger than the flu, and has a whopping 2,556 genes. Even crazier, only 6 percent of those genes are familiar to us. The rest are completely new.

The researchers have decided to give the virus the genus name "pandoravirus," referring to the likelihood that the discovery will lead to all kinds of new knowledge about viruses. The first pandoravirus found, pictured above, turned up in a routine dig off the coast of Chile, and puzzled the researchers until they realized that it contained no bacterial DNA at all, and must in fact be a giant virus. But it's not one of a kind; shortly after, in an Australian pond, they found another. The researchers believe this indicates that pandoraviruses aren't rare at all, though much is still unknown about them (like, for example, why they're so much bigger than other viruses).

They might be huge, but the pandoraviruses discovered so far live only underwater and don't seem dangerous to humans. "This is not going to cause any kind of widespread and acute illness or epidemic or anything," said Eugene Koonin of the National Institutes of Health to NPR. So we won't be adding it to this list anytime soon. Hopefully.

[New York Times]

The same vaccine that protects women from cervical cancer also prevents an oral infection that sometimes leads to throat cancer in both sexes, a new study has found. And the throat cancer is actually much more common in men than women.

The vaccine has been controversial in the U.S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend boys and girls get a human papillomavirus vaccine around age 11 or 12. However, some parents oppose the recommendation because they believe offering the vaccine gives their kids the message that sexual activity is okay. Others seem to think their kids won't need it.

The new study found that among 2,910 women who got Cervarix, an HPV vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline, only one got an oral HPV infection after four years. Among the 2,924 women who didn't get Cervarix, 15 had an oral HPV infection. That makes the vaccine 93 percent effective against oral HPV infection, the study scientists wrote in a paper they published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE.

This is the first time anybody has studied whether an HPV vaccine protects against oral as well as genital infections. The results could make HPV vaccines more popular among men and boys-or rather, the parents of boys, who decide whether to vaccinate them. While cervical cancer affects only women, both sexes can get HPV infections that lead to genital warts, anal cancers and oral and throat cancers. Men are four times more likely to get oropharyngeal cancers-a cancer of the back of the throat-than women.

The study didn't include any men, but previous studies have found that HPV vaccines are equally effective against infections in men and women.

Cervarix protects against two strains of the human papillomavirus, HPV16 and HPV18. HPV16 shows up in 90 percent of HPV infections. It also causes a subset of oropharyngeal cancers. In the past, drinking and smoking caused the majority of such throat cancers, but recently, doctors have seen increasing numbers of HPV-caused oropharyngeal cancers, especially among young adults in developed countries. Researchers now think viruses cause 30 percent of oropharyngeal cancers worldwide.

Just last month, actor Michael Douglas told the U.K.'s The Guardian that his throat cancer was caused by an infection from performing oral sex on a woman. (A doctor The Guardian talked with, who hadn't treated Douglas, seemed to think it's more likely Douglas' cancer came from a combination of smoking, drinking and infection.) Douglas said he has been clear of the cancer for more than two years now.

An estimated 14 million Americans get infected by HPV every year. Although most won't see any symptoms, the virus can cause genital warts, cervical cancer and other cancers.

The study was performed in Costa Rica, with funding from the U.S.' National Cancer Institute. The study scientists came from institutes in Europe, the U.S. and Costa Rica. GlaxoSmithKline donated the vaccine for the study.