So this is what happens when you exaggerate the power of your science. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last week that it's going to review 2,100 cases it solved between 1985 and 2000 to see if forensic analysts overstated their evidence or reported their evidence inaccurately.

The cases all have to do with microscopic hair analysis, in which analysts examine hairs under a microscope for characteristics such as color and thickness. The cases up for re-examination include ones in which defendants already have execution dates, McClatchy reports.

Forensic analysis techniques have come under fire over the past decade, as scientists have have questioned whether analyses are truly as ironclad as they may seem on the witness stand. Now, we're finally seeing several different efforts from federal agencies to fix the flaws in forensic science. In 2012, the Department of Justice announced it would review at least 21,000 cases that went through the FBI's hair and fibers unit. This February, the department created a commission that will set certification standards for analysts.

In the hair microscopy cases, the FBI will offer free DNA tests to those defendants whose cases have errors. The Department of Justice has agreed not to raise certain objections, such as the statute of limitations, against defendants who want to challenge their convictions based on a microscopic hair analysis.

It isn't clear how accurate non-DNA hair analysis is. In its 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences found no good studies of the technique's error rates. The academy concluded that it has "limited probative value" and isn't able to pinpoint individual defendants.

The FBI isn't ready to give up on the analysis just yet, however. "There is no reason to believe the FBI Laboratory employed 'flawed' forensic techniques," FBI Special Agent Ann Todd, a spokeswoman for the bureau, told McClatchy. It's still used in labs, she said. Todd emphasized that the review is about analysts' testimony.

Last year, American car buyers named fuel economy the most important consideration when shopping for a car, outranking even quality and safety. The change coincides nicely with the flood of hybrid and high-efficiency internal-combustion engines on the market. But as efficient as an engine may be-the best among them can get up to 50 miles per gallon-they can't compensate for one glaring inefficiency: us. Poor driving habits (floor it!) can slash fuel economy by as much as one-third. To maximize it, engineers need to not only remake the cars; they need to remake the drivers.

In his dissertation "Charismatic Computers," B.J. Fogg, a psychologist at Stanford University, demonstrated how technology can influence behaviors. In his model, an action is the result of three elements-motivation, ability, and a trigger. For drivers, the motivation for efficiency is clear: saving fuel saves money. (What's more, it can help reduce their carbon footprint.) And any driver has the ability to save gas just by sticking below 50 mph and avoiding abrupt acceleration and braking. What's been missing is the trigger.

As efficient as engines may be-the best get 50 mpg-they can't compensate for one glaring inefficiency: us. Until the late 1990s, drivers had no way of knowing how much fuel they were consuming at a given time. Then Honda introduced the Insight, the first mass-produced hybrid in the U.S. It was one of the first cars with a real-time fuel-consumption meter in the dash. The trigger was born. Now the dashboards of eco-friendly cars, whether it's the Ford Fusion or the Nissan Leaf, are packed with instruments that are designed to encourage better habits. The Fusion's LCD, for example, shows leaves and vines to signify good driving.

Real-time data interfaces are spilling into cars with conventional internal-combustion drivetrains, as well. In the past few years, developers have launched a number of smartphone apps that analyze a phone's accelerometer data to provide readouts of driving style and its effect on fuel efficiency. Other apps, including Torque and Automatic, incorporate dongles that plug into a car's onboard diagnostics port. The Bluetooth-connected dongles relay engine-performance information from a car's onboard computer to an app. The Automatic app, for instance, chimes when it detects speeding, hard braking, or hard acceleration.

Just as Fogg predicted, these triggers work. A study by the University of California Transportation Center found that when drivers were provided with instantaneous miles-per-gallon feedback, fuel economy improved on average by 6 percent on city streets. Apply those gains across only one-third of the cars in the U.S. and drivers could save billions of dollars in gas.

Monitoring and controlling driver behavior could also pave the way for automotive advances. Quantifying cars is an important step toward automating them. The more performance data automakers collect, the better able they will be to perfect the algorithms that will eventually direct our automatic chauffeurs.

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

The London Times recounts a true American horror story: Mindy Kaling, writer and actress first on The Office and later on her own show, The Mindy Project, in addition to author of a successful memoir, walked into a Los Angeles boutique. And she was not recognized. This is a worst-case scenario for any Los Angeles boutique owner. How can you give VIP treatment to someone when you don't recognize them as a VIP?

Thankfully, technology has come to the rescue. The U.K. branch of the Japanese company NEC has developed some facial recognition software with a very specific angle: to figure out if retail shoppers are secretly people who deserve better treatment than lowly normal shoppers. NPR reports that the system is made up of a database of pictures of possible VIPs, specifically "celebrities and valued customers." When customers walk in, their faces are scanned with what sounds like a camera.

We say "sounds like" because NEC isn't spilling the details of how this thing works, but given that the goal of the product is to take measurements of specific parts of the face that can't be hidden--distance between eyes, that kind of thing--it sounds like you could handle the task with simply a camera. Those measurements are then compared with the database of VIPs, and if a match is found, it'll send an alert to the store, along with some details like size and shopping history. NPR says it'll work even if the celeb in question is wearing sunglasses, a hat, or, presumably, a giant Groucho Marx glasses/nose/mustache.

The technology is certainly there to support this kind of thing; Google has had reverse image search, in which an image is matched with Google's own massive repository of images, for years now. Whether it's cost-effective depends on how valuable it is for a shop to identify high-rollers. Whether the VIPs in question would like to know that their faces have been analyzed and their clothes sizes beamed to a store employee's cellphone within seconds of walking into a store, well, that's a different question.

[via NPR]

Apollo 11 landed on the moon 44 years ago on July 20, 1969. Then, four days later, the command module of the spacecraft landed back on Earth. This photo shows flight controllers celebrating their success July 24, 1969.

You can check out other bits of Apollo 11 history here on Popular Science. See a page from the flight plan, read 10 quirky facts about the mission and learn about some moon dust samples that had gotten misplaced until just this past May.

Let's take a look at the ingredients in a typical can of cat food: meat by-products, chicken by-product meal, turkey by-product meal, ash, taurine. Nothing too horrible, but in general, these things don't constitute a healthy human diet, says Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian with the American Dietetic Association. "That said, I'm fully confident that your body can handle kitty chow."

Your liver, kidneys and skin do a terrific job of removing foreign substances from the body, especially mild ones like those found in cat food. "Technically, you could safely digest a baseball," Blatner says. Perhaps the worst stuff in cat food is the high mineral content in the ash, but your body would clear that out quickly.

Actually, the ingredients listed on the organic blends of cat food sound pretty tasty. Newman's Own canned beef formula uses only free-range beef from Uruguay, is 95 percent USDA-certified organic, and is chock-full of vitamins. Pass me a spoon, right? "Those are better," Blatner says, "but they too are developed with cat nutrition in mind and aren't formulated to keep humans healthy. It's OK to satisfy the occasional craving, but you shouldn't make it a staple of your regular diet. It's cat food for a reason."

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

In a new summer film, everyone's favorite genetic anomaly will lose the reason he has been able to snikt! though skirmishes, scuffs, and scrapes for the last century and a half-superhuman healing abilities. The mutation that makes Wolverine worthy of the X-Men is that his cells regenerate at incredible speeds. He ages at a snail's pace, he can re-grow parts of limbs and organs after serious injury, and he is basically impervious to infection and disease. Until now.

In The Wolverine, which opens July 26, a former Japanese soldier whose life Wolverine saved during WWII offers a way to remove the mutant's regenerative superpowers. Since living forever can be its own kind of torment, Wolverine-Logan to his friends--happily accepts. Suddenly, the mutant with the metal skull and chilling claws is more vulnerable than ever before. What might this expert fighter, hunter, and swordsman have to fear now? I haven't seen the film. Nor have I read a detailed plot summary. But here, I take a few guesses using science as my guide:

Concussions

When your brain jiggles around in the skull enough to bump into one of the sides, you get a concussion. This can result in everything from dizziness and slurred speech to trouble balancing and potentially fatal blood clots. Repeated concussions can cause brain damage and lifetime impairment, sadly evidenced by some of our aging football players.

With his skull coated in the indestructible metal adamantium, you would think that Wolverine would be immune to a concussion. If fact, it doesn't really matter what his skull is made of. The real problem is the movement of the brain. As long as it has space to move-within the cushion of fluid inside your skull-the brain will always be vulnerable to a traumatic bump or bash. Think of it like a car accident; no matter what the car is made of, when it hits a wall the driver will still be thrown around.

Try as we might to stop the increasing number of concussions in sports like American football, recent studies have found that standard helmets don't prevent these traumas. Helmets protect the skull from fracture and the scalp from lesion, but not the brain from internal bumps.

So even with a helmet of adamantium, Wolverine is as susceptible to concussions as you are, a fact that the movie's villains may want to exploit. Comic books have done so in the past, showing that Wolverine can be knocked out cold by a wooden sword. And the recent X-Men films also show this weakness. In X2: X-Men United, Wolverine gets shot in the forehead from point-blank range and is rendered unconscious. Though his skull prevents penetration, the impact from the bullet-equivalent to being hit in the face with a baseball going 185 miles per hour-still floors the mighty mutant. If he has lost his regenerative powers, a few strategic knocks to the noggin could permanently disable Logan.

Cancer

Wolverine's skeleton is coated in the indestructible metal adamantium, and it makes him nearly invincible. But without regenerative powers, Logan won't be the human wrecking crew he once was.

Comic book canon dictates that Logan carries 100 pounds of adamantium on his already burly frame, bringing his total weight up to 300 pounds. Obvious advantages come along with such reinforcement. Wolverine will never break a bone. Wolverine also has superhuman strength because he has had to lug around an extra 100 pounds of metal for decades. And having indestructible bones means that Logan doesn't even need to use his claws to kill. With his super-strength, he can land a punch that would be like running face-first into scaffolding. Some sources estimate that heavyweight blows have killed around 650 boxers in the last century; adding an indestructible metal fist to the equation spells trouble.

But there are serious disadvantages to a heavy metal frame. Now that Wolverine has lost his ability to fight off disease and infection, his most dangerous enemy could also be the smallest. Leukemia, a cancer affecting bone marrow, would be nearly impossible to treat. Chemotherapy wouldn't be able to penetrate the adamantium and the infected marrow, and radiation therapy would be far less effective as many metals block or dampen radiation (that's why you wear a lead vest over vulnerable areas during an X-ray).

Magnets

Wolverine's biggest strength--his metal skeleton--also leads to his key weakness: magnets. From the movies and the comic books we know that Logan is extremely vulnerable to magnetic fields, as Magneto can twist and toss him as he pleases with a mutant ability to control magnetic fields. In the comics, Magneto even violently ripped Logan's metal reinforcements from his body. But at least Wolverine had regenerative powers to help him survive the ordeal. Imagine what could happen without them.

Villains could lure Logan into a giant magnet. At high enough energies, the magnetic field would interact with Wolverine's atoms and molecules, effectively suspending him in a levitating prison. Amazingly, this trap isn't science fiction, as researchers have built magnets strong enough to levitate frogs in exactly the same way.

The frog would fare far better than Logan would. If confined in a rotating magnetic prison, something like a giant MRI machine, Logan wouldn't even be able to move his limbs (very well at least). Because he has 100 pounds of metal grafted to his skeleton, Logan would experience magnetic induction-the magnets spinning around him would create magnetic fields in his bones. This induced magnetic field would attract and repel the prison's, effectively preventing motion. You can see this slowing effect when you put a chunk of aluminum in an MRI machine and let it fall.

Villains could be far more devious. A prison with spinning magnets would keep Wolverine in place, but one with a giant electromagnet would melt him from the inside out.

If you run an electric current through a coil of wire, the electricity creates a magnetic field. Put a piece of metal, or Wolverine, inside this coil and you can suspend it in the field. But if you rapidly change the direction of the electricity flowing through the coil-as AC ("alternating current") would do-Wolverine's metal skeleton would begin to heat up. The changing current in the coil creates a changing magnetic field, in the coil and in Wolverine, both leading to a changing electrical current in Wolverine's metal skeleton. If you leave some metal in this setup long enough, the electrons bump and bash against each other to the point of melting. Shut down the coil, and all you are left with is a puddle of metal, or, in perhaps this most scientifically accurate of villainous plans, a puddle of Wolverine.

We will have to wait until July 26 to see how Wolverine fares without his regenerative powers. But no matter what, any villain would have to be ingenious and devious enough to avoid the weapons Wolverine is most famous for. Beware the Snikt!

Kyle Hill is a science writer whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Nautilus, Wired, Slate, and io9. You can follow him on Twitter @Sci_Phile.

What's the first thing you'd want to know if you learned you had to undergo chemotherapy? Oncologist Susan Melin of the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina told the Associated Press that often, her patients ask first about hair loss. "It's not, 'Is this going to cure me?' It's, 'Am I going to lose my hair?'" she said.

U.S. researchers are now conducting trials on one brand of cold cap, called DigniCap, meant to reduce that hair loss. The caps are connected to machines that chill them to around 41 degrees Fahrenheit. The idea is that by slowing blood flow to the scalp, they reduce the amount of chemotherapy drug that reaches the scalp and destroys hairs.

While the caps are commonly used in Europe and Canada, they haven't been well studied enough for scientists to know for sure if they're safe and work well, the Associated Press reports. They aren't U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved. If the U.S. trials show the caps work, however, they could get approved, become eligible for coverage by insurance and become more popular in the U.S. (Patients in some U.S. cancer centers may already bring their own caps to the center, if their doctors agree.)

Good results would be a big boon for cancer patients. Although the chilly caps don't help with big guns like life expectancy or remission rates, they address a major concern for many patients. And why not? It's your hair. The vast majority of people in the world have it. It's understandable that some cancer patients get upset when they lose theirs.

Oncologists the AP talked with mentioned patients who delayed therapy because of hair concerns, as well as patients who lost business because their hair loss made them look "sick" to business partners.

The main safety concern is that cap-wearers could get reoccurrences of their cancer in their scalps, since the caps reduce drug flow there. However, cancer reoccurrences in the scalp are rare, the AP reports. A side effect of the cap is that it's painful to wear because it's so cold, Miriam Lipton, a breast cancer patient who tried the DigniCap, told the AP.

The major U.S. trial will study early-stage breast cancer patients, beginning late this summer. Dignitana, the Sweden-based company whose caps are being used in the trial, has information on how to join a trial.

[Associated Press]

Though whales, gibbons and even mice can produce songs, mammals typically aren't capable of altering their song composition and structure in the way that songbirds can. Bats seem to be the exception to this rule, producing variable songs that sound a whole lot like birdsongs. The nocturnal mammals, notorious for relying on their ears rather than their eyes, use singing to attract mates, rather than the visual cues typical of other animals, like brightly colored feathers.

Over a period of three years, Texas A&M biology professor Mike Smotherman recorded the calls and songs of the thousands of free-tailed bats roosting in the university's football stadium. He found that male bats can be pretty creative when it comes to their serenades, creating different singing styles.

The seductive croons of free-tailed bats have a syntax and structure with different types of phrases and syllables, one that can alter songs based on the social context. The bats alter their phrases to produce new styles.

When it comes to finding a mate, the bat has to get to the point, and quickly. A romantic bat flyby only presents an attention-grabbing window about one-tenth of a second long, so a male bat uses one specific song to get a female's attention as she flies by his roost at 30 feet per second. Then, if she deigns to join him, he mixes up the songs to keep her entertained long enough to get down to business.

No romantic duets, though, unfortunately: Bat songs are an exclusively male domain.

The research is published in Animal Behaviour.

[Nature World News]

Researchers at the University of Oregon have recently unearthed fossils in South Africa that present evidence of life on land 2.2 billion years ago-four times older than traditionally thought.

The fossilized organisms, dubbed Diskagma buttonii, are no bigger than the size of a standard match head and were found threaded together in bunches. Though researchers are still unsure as to their biological function, the organisms most closely resemble a modern fungus called Geosiphon. The team believes Diskagma could be the oldest known eukaryote, a cellular organism containing a nucleus.

The results of the study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack, provide new insight into the development of Earth's atmosphere. Examining the fossils suggests that the greening of Earth, involving the rise of oxygen and emergence of new plant and animal forms, occurred much earlier than 500 million years ago, the previous estimate.

"There is independent evidence for cyanobacteria, but not fungi, of the same geological age, and these new fossils set a new and earlier benchmark for the greening of the land," Retallack says in a statement. "This gains added significance because fossil soils hosting the fossils have long been taken as evidence for a marked rise in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at about 2.4 billion to 2.2 billion years ago, widely called the Great Oxidation Event."

Images of Diskagma were constructed using powerful X-rays from a particle accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. They show hollow, urn-shaped structures with an attached tube. Retallack tells Popular Science that the fossils' age was determined using radiometric dating of surrounding rocks.

"At last we have an idea of what life on land looked like in the Precambrian," Retallack says. "Perhaps with this search image in mind, we can find more and different kinds of fossils in ancient soils."

The study appears in the September issue of the journal Precambrian Research.

NASA has announced the award-winners of its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, in which the agency gives funding to projects that are a little more, uh, ambitious than usual. (One previous candidate: satellites that beam energy down to Earth.) This year's proposals are pretty wild, too (suspended animation! perpetual flight!), and they're getting a one-year advance of $100,000 to prove the plans have some merit. After that, they'll be re-considered for Phase II study, which would mean $500,000 for two years. Here's what they've got in mind.

From the outside, Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft model resembles a high-tech gumdrop. On the inside, it's a spacious, LED-glowing dream. The new commercial vehicle is designed to transport NASA astronauts to and from low Earth orbit. Boeing recently unveiled the interior for the first time.

Bigelow Aerospace constructed the capsule's exterior shell, which is 14.8 feet wide. Inside the vehicle are two rows of seats for five astronauts. Two additional seats can be added if necessary to fit up to seven passengers.

Passengers enter from the side hatch and exit from the overhead hatch upon docking to the International Space Station, and frontal and portal windows will offer views of space (eee!). The control console, which features touch-panel digital displays, hands above the two front seats for easy access. The CST-100 also fits a freezer in order to preserve science experiments in-flight.

One of the most distinctive features of the design is the purple glow emanating from within the cabin. This is Boeing's "Sky Interior" LED lighting designed to create a calming environment for the astronauts.

There's still one crucial thing missing: the capsule has yet to feature a waste-containment component. Oh well, surely astronauts can hold it for at least 5 hours and 39 minutes.

CST-100's first piloted orbital flight is on schedule for 2016. NASA expects to be able to buy seats on commercially-operated flights to the space station the following year.

The Cold War might be over, but that hasn't made the threat of a nuclear blast any less upsetting. Especially when you visualize it in 3-D, as Alex Wellerstein has done here.

Wellerstein is a historian of nuclear weapons who created a series of map widgets that let you simulate nuclear blasts of the size, and in the location, of your choosing. An earlier version of the NukeMap provided all of this and wind direction too, but it was a flat map, which feels as sterile and dated as a Soviet-era textbook. His latest version shows blasts in 3-D. His goal, he says, is helping "people visualize nuclear weapons on terms they can make sense of - helping them to get a sense of the scale of the bombs." This is important because, he says:

So here's New York in a nuclear blast:

The NukeMap3D renders blasts either in animation, a completed mushroom cloud, or color-coded rings for a blast radius:

The latter format does the best job of revealing where one would need to be to survive the blast. If midtown were hit by a 10-kiloton blast--the size of the nuclear weapon North Korea tested in February--people within half a mile would be dead immediately from the blast or radiation. Beyond a mile or so away, so south of 14th street or north of 53rd, people would be safe from the majority of radiation poisoning and the skin-burning thermal radiation that comes with a nuclear blast. Popular Science headquarters, FWIW, is in the heart of midtown. Suddenly, New Jersey looks like a great place to work.

This little molecule is what stress looks like.

Researchers from Heptares Therapeutics, a drug company, have discovered the 3-D structure of a protein receptor that mediates our response to stress, according to a new study in Nature. Using a powerful X-ray machine at Diamond Light Source, the UK's national particle accelerator, they were able to detail the structure of CRF1, a find that they say opens up the possibility of creating specially tailored drugs to treat depression and anxiety.

CRF1, a molecule on the outside of cells on the pituitary gland, releases CRF, hormones involved in regulating our stress response that over time contribute to anxiety and depression.

A vital aspect of the discovery is that the receptor has a small binding pocket located in a much different position than other G-protein-coupled receptors, (GPCRs). Knowing the structure of Class B GPCRs like CRF1 could potentially help researchers develop drugs that better target receptors within the same family, Heptares claims. Scientists could just design a drug that pops right into that pocket.

"The finding that the structure of CRF1, a Class B GPCR, is completely different to previously solved Class A receptors confirms why Class B receptors could not previously be modeled for the purpose of rational drug design," said Fiona Marshall, Chief Scientific Officer for Heptares, in a press statement. "Now we know its shape, we can design a molecule that will lock into this crevice and block it so that CRF1 becomes inactive--ending the biochemical cascade that ends in stress," she later told the Sunday Times. The company says it could possibly also lead to targeted drugs for Type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis, since those diseases deal with receptors of the same class and structure.

The discovery is detailed online in Nature this week.

[The Independent]

Just a week from now, thousands of people will trek to Rockland, Maine for a festival devoted entirely to the eating of a creature once thought only worthy of "poverty food" and fertilizer. The lobster festival approacheth. In honor of the occasion, a reminder of all that makes the lobster beautiful: that attractive red color it turns when ready to be devoured.

Though natural color variations due to diet and genetics do occur, the shelled seafood you crack open at Red Lobster probably didn't start off that deep orange-red color we've come to associate with crustacean snacks. Live American lobsters usually look kind of muddy brown, even though their shells contain astaxanthin, a carotenoid from the same family of organic pigments that includes beta-carotene, the source of carrots' bright hue. Astaxanthin is also responsible for the pink coloring of flamingos, salmon, krill, shrimp and crabs.

Free astaxanthin appears red, but when it binds to proteins in the lobster's shell, the bonds twist the pigment, changing its color. Depending on the type of protein it bonds to, there's either what's called a bathochromic shift, which turns the pigment blue, or a hyspochromic shift, to yellow. When you're looking at a lobster, you're seeing light reflecting through different layers of free and bonded astaxanthin--a lot of colors mixed together, hence the muddy brown.

Adult lobsters' size keeps them from getting eaten by most other sea creatures, but since it takes them 7 years to grow to their full stature, a little bit of camouflage is a survival necessity in the interim. The nondescript color helps them blend into their surroundings at the bottom of the ocean. "They really need to have this cryptic lifestyle," says Michael Tlusty, the director of research at Boston's New England Aquarium.

"What happens when you cook it, you denature the protein through the heat, and it releases the pigment," he explains. The resulting free astaxanthin makes the shell red all the way through. The same process applies to crabs and shrimp.

In lobsters, more unusual colors are possible, though not as common. Some lobsters genetically look a blue, for instance. Different foods can change a lobster's color, as well: A diet devoid of astaxanthin (usually ingested via algae, seaweed or shrimp) turns a lobster completely white.

A synthetic version of astaxanthin is used as a food supplement for farm-raised seafood and eggs to improve their color. Humans, too, can benefit: It's a powerful antioxidant with anti-cancer properties that some studies have shown can improve wrinkles, protect against UV light, reduce inflammation and potentially treat cardiovascular disease.

One survey of the 3-D printing landscape will quickly show you that it's brimming with novelty items and useless junk. But don't let that overwhelm you! We sorted through the clutter to create this list of 10 projects that are both awesome and practical.

Don't have a 3-D printer yet? Chicago's got you covered...

Click here to enter the gallery

We are creeping closer to the inevitable time when sous vide will be a mainstream technique in home kitchens. Sous vide, for those who need a refresher, is the increasingly popular method of cooking food enclosed in a plastic bag for a long time in a water bath at a precise temperature. Vacuum-sealing the bag is optional, but gives the technique its popular name (sous vide is French for "under vacuum"). The precise cooking produces unprecedentedly tender and flavorful meats, like a perfectly medium-rare steak or soft poached egg, with no risk of over- or undercooking.

Over the last few years, it's spread from experimenters repurposing laboratory equipment, to innovative restaurant kitchens, to regular restaurant kitchens, to adventurous home cooks, and now seems poised to break into the conservative counter space of typical home cooks.

Accordingly, the technology has evolved to become more counter-friendly, with some very promising designs that I can't wait to get my mitts on.

Here's a look at how the tech is growing from the first generation of tools to a second wave that's coming soon; and how to decide which sort of sous vide gadget you may want to invest in.

Whoa. One cosmologist is proposing that the universe isn't actually expanding, as the standard theory goes. Instead, the redshift effects astronomers see could mean that everything is just gaining more mass, while possibly staying in place, or even contracting.

The theory, which comes from a University of Heidelberg physicist named Christof Wetterich, hasn't yet been peer reviewed, Nature News reports. Interestingly, Nature News also reports that the idea isn't testable because masses are measured relative to one another, so even if the universe were gaining mass, we'd never know, because they'd all still be the same relative to one another.

Nevertheless, Wetterich told Nature News that the advantages of his idea include: 1) another way of looking at the universe, which could be helpful, and 2) a theory of the universe that helps explain some troublesome predictions from the standard expansion idea.

A mass-gaining universe could create a phenomenon that astronomers see every day: the redshift the light coming from distant galaxies, Nature News explains. Currently, astronomers interpret that redshift as a sign that the universe is expanding.

Nature News also covers other physicists' reactions to Wetterich's idea. Some say it's worth considering, and worth shaking up cosmologists' views. Others aren't as convinced.

[Nature News]

Aircraft design is often overlooked in discussions of the FAA's multibillion-dollar NextGen initiative, the elaborate mélange of satellite-based guidance, arrival, and departure technologies intended to modernize the outdated and much-criticized national airspace system by 2025. Yet a team led by researchers at California Polytechnic State University found that one of the easiest ways to improve system efficiency may be to reengineer the plane itself.

As part of a five-year NASA research project, the team designed a 100-passenger Cruise Efficient, Short Take-Off and Landing (Cestol) airliner that could arrive and depart at steep angles to and from 3,000-foot-long runways. "This plane was designed with a circulation-control wing, which generates higher lift at lower speeds," says David Marshall, an associate professor with Cal Poly's aerospace-engineering department. "We can reduce the field length by 50 percent."

For the past year, scientists have wind-tunnel-tested a 2,500-pound model with a 10-foot wingspan, nicknamed Amelia (for Advanced Model for Extreme Lift and Improved Aeroacoustics), at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Other researchers studied how Cestol planes would integrate into existing infrastructure. Results show that in tandem with NextGen's approach and departure routing, which could allow planes to fly outside traditional flight paths, Cestol aircraft could land at underused, shorter runways or at smaller regional airports. Spreading air traffic over more runways would relieve congestion and substantially reduce flight delays.

Because aircraft-design cycles can span decades, Cestol craft will probably not arrive on commercial runways for a dozen years or more. But when they do, Amelia will probably stand as an influence. "I don't know that Boeing will make a plane that looks just like Amelia," Marshall says, "But I do expect some of the technology to transition over."

How It Works: The Cestol Airliner

Over-the-Wing Engines
Scientists at Cal Poly mounted the Cestol's turboprop engines above the wing-as opposed to underneath it-for two reasons. First, exhaust passing over the wing increases lift. Second, the wing deflects engine noise, shielding communities below. "NASA wants aircraft noise reduced by 52 decibels," Marshall says. "So far, we're already looking at a 30-decibel reduction."

Circulation Control
Conventional wings often have multiple flap elements, which rotate downward to increase the curve of the airfoil. The Cestol has a single flap, augmented by a narrow slot that runs the length of the wing. When the flap rotates downward, the slot channels high-pressure air over the top of the wing and directs the wind stream downward, increasing lift.

Deflecting Jet Exhaust
To combine the effects of engine exhaust and circulation control, the team moved the turbofans to the front of the wings. When the flaps rotate down, the exhaust is pulled into a low pressure region, which increases lift and allows for even slower and steeper ascents. "With this design, we can generate lifts five to 10 times higher than a conventional wing," Marshall says.

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