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Video: GRASP Lab Quadcopters Play the James Bond Theme on Actual Instruments

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Quadcopter on Percussion

We've written so much about the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab and their adorably awesome autonomous quadcopters that we kind of feel like we've watched them grow up. We've watched them learn how to move around, watched them play with building blocks, and watched them learn how to interact with each other. So we'll never forget this, our favorite quadcopters' first music recital.

This video really needs no more introduction. The song is the James Bond Theme, with quadcopters on piano, guitar, percussion, maracas, you name it. They even rock a makeshift instrument made of strings stretched across a couch frame. Enjoy.


U.S. State Department Wants You to Find Fugitive Gem Thieves Via Twitter

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Finding Faces in a Crowd thisisbossi via Flickr
Play the Tag Challenge later this month

How quickly can an organically grown network of manhunters find five fugitives in five different countries? Later this month, the U.S. State Department aims to find out. The Tag Challenge will pay $5,000 to the people who find all of them first.

With nothing but a mug shot and a short bio for background, players will have to use social media to locate and take photographs of five "suspects" in Washington, D.C., New York, London, Stockholm and Bratislava. The point is to find out how well social media can be used to accomplish a real, time-sensitive law enforcement goal.

It's inspired in part by DARPA's Network Challenge, a bizarre national balloon hunt that experts initially said was impossible but was accomplished in nine hours. In that challenge, MIT researchers devised a payment system that rewarded accurate balloon-finding tips as well as the people who invited the finders. That contest was worth a more handsome $40,000, however.

The Tag Challenge premise: Five jewel thieves have lifted the world's 3rd most valuable diamond from a showroom in Washington, D.C., and split to the five different cities. The person or team who finds them and uploads all of their photographs will win $5,000, courtesy of the State Depatment. The contest was devised in part by J.R. Lara, a grad student at George Washington University, who attended a conference on trans-Atlantic security and social media, according to Danger Room. He wanted to test whether social media could actually result in actionable intelligence, he tells DR.

The suspects' mug shots will be unveiled March 31, which is go time for the contest. Find out more about it here.

[via Danger Room]

The Canon 5D Mark III Is Here

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Canon 5D Mark III Dan Bracaglia

Canon's followup to the 5D Mark II, easily one of the most popular DSLRs ever made, is finally here, and it looks like a healthy sequel (and competitor to the recently-announced Nikon D800). The major upgrade in the Mark III is the new autofocus system, but it also gets a sensor overhaul, a new image processor, an SD card slot alongside the typical CF, and an onboard external mic and headphone jack for taking video. Our photo-fanatic sister site PopPhoto has the full story.

Will People Alive Today Have the Opportunity to Upload Their Consciousness to a New Robotic Body?

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Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia
A Russian mogul wants to make sure the answer is yes, and soon

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn't really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person's consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov's vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it's already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

Which is terrifying and amazing and disconcerting all at the same time.

We've already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality.But is it even within the realm of possibility? Phase one--creating a robot controlled by a human brain--is already well within reach. In fact, DARPA is already working on it via a program called "Avatar" (which, incidentally, is also the name of Itskov's project) through which the Pentagon hopes to create a brain-machine interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines remotely with their minds.

And of course there are all the ongoing medical prosthesis projects (DARPA is involved in a few of these as well) that have shown that the human nervous system can interface with prosthetic enhancements, manipulating them via thought. Itskov draws a clear arc from what we have now to the consciousness-containing holograms that he envisions. All we have to do is attack the technological obstacles in between, one at a time, until we get there.

If only it were that easy. But Itskov also makes a valid point. In the past decade alone we've witnessed brain-machine interfaces emerge from the realm of nascent, futuristic ideas to mechanisms firmly rooted in reality. There's still so much we don't know about the brain, but better technology (and an abundance of funding in this field spurred by the horrific neurological and extremity injuries inflicted on American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan) is expanding the envelope of possibility every year.

What Itskov is really saying--though in a very ambitious way--is that we've already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality via prostheses that interface with our nervous centers. If you can interface a brain with a hand, and then a brain with an entire arm, why not a brain with two arms? With two legs? With everything else? The question now is figuring out where the limitations lay--just how far down that road we can go.

And what a hypothetical road it is. Theoretically, as long as one could keep his or her gray matter from decaying, he or she could continue to "live" indefinitely (at least if you buy into the idea that our consciousness lives in the wiring of our neurons). Phase three of Itskov's plan--dispensing with the physical brain and uploading consciousness directly to a computer or robot--does away with the organic matter entirely, making your consciousness as permanent as that CD-ROM version of Myst that still lingers in the bottom of one of your desk drawers. People as programs--paging Kevin Flynn.

Of course, there are myriad reasons why uploading human consciousness to some kind of computer won't work, not least of which being the fact that every attempt we've made at creating a computer that functions just like the brain has come up far short. And creating a hologram that also contains that consciousness? We're not seeing it--not in thirty years, not in this century. Still, progress is being made in neural networks, microchips modeled on living brains, and entire computers set up to mimic the brain's functionality. We've built synthetic analogs for all kinds of organs. The brain is the most complex of all, but following a certain line of reasoning--the line Itskov seems to be following--it's only a matter of time and determination before we deliver a neurological analog as well.

All that is to say that Itskov's vision, while overly-ambitious (and we like overly ambitious here), is not as completely far out as it sounds--at least not the earlier phases. People that are today firmly connected to their living bodies, consciousness all bound up in their craniums, may within their lifetimes be presented with a choice. Call it selective corporeality. In the future, questions about mechanical immortality--do we really want to live beyond our bodies as "conscious" machines? Is a robot or computer driven by a living brain a person, with all the rights and privileges inherent therein? Can i get jets implanted in my robo-hands and robo-feet so that I can fly like Iron Man?--could become, to some degree, actual questions that we have to consider, this time non-hypothetically.

It's more than my non-mechanically enhanced consciousness can even start to think about.

PopSci Q&A: Kate Findlay Talks About the Confluence of Quilting and the Large Hadron Collider

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How a quilter ended up in the pages of a particle physics publication

We first became aware of Kate Findlay's work thanks to Symmetry Magazine, which publishes articles relating to particle physics. Kate isn't a particle physicist; in fact, she's not even a scientist. She works as an art teacher at a private elementary school in the U.K., and also makes these amazing quilts. Symmetry's interest (and ours, and yours, we think) comes from her inspiration for one particular line of quilts: the hardware of the Large Hadron Collider. We've put together a gallery of her work, and also did a little Q&A with her, below.


Click to launch the gallery of quilts.

PopSci: How long have you been making quilts? Do you work with other materials?

Kate Findlay: I have not been making quilts that long, really. My first one was in 2008, about six months before I started work on the Hadron Collider series. I have always been a painter in my spare time, mostly landscapes and still-lifes, but I work exclusively in fabric now, even when doing more pictorial pieces (like my Henley river series on my website).

PS: Where did the inspiration come from to look to the LHC?

KF: I was reading The Times in September 2008 and came across an illustrated article about the LHC. I knew about it anyway, but something just struck a chord with me and I immediately started researching online to find more images. I was very excited by what I found and knew without a shadow of doubt that this was something I wanted to develop into a body of work. (CERN gave me permission to use their photos.)

PS: What about the LHC spoke to you as regards quilt-making? Why that connection?

KF: The LHC is a remarkably beautiful machine. Its symmetry, the repeating motifs, [and] the colors were all things that I was drawn to--for any textile artist, pattern and color are top of the list and the LHC has all these! The other aspect I particularly liked was the idea of a regular circle within a square; I wanted to explore variations on this theme. Working in fabric is extremely slow and laborious, and there have been a number of occasions over the past three years when I wished I was just painting the subject. But fabric has an added dimension, its texture and sheen, which has really worked for me in making these pieces.

PS: How did you come across the LHC's work? Were you a fan of that branch of science beforehand?

KF: I did know about it, but in a pretty general way--just what had come up in the news and through people talking about it. I have always liked science, but certainly wasn't paying much attention to the physics of it all. That has changed with this work, and I have been reading up on the physics discoveries of the 20th century and what the current theories are, although I confess I don't understand much of it!

PS: What is it about the LHC that you're trying to capture in these quilts? How do you choose the colors, patterns, and techniques that go into them?

KF: When I started, I was just enjoying creating pieces that had a flavor of parts of the machine I had seen images of. As I read more, I have been trying to get some of the physics concepts into my work. One of the things that has struck me most is the aspect of scale--the huge Hadron Collider is trying to split infinitesimally small subatomic particles--to find out how our vast, vast universe is put together. So I have found aspects of astronomy creeping in to my work as well as studies of how atoms are formed and split.

The colors in my work have been very influenced by things I have seen in the CERN photos as well as using lots of metallic fabrics. More recently I have started to dye and screen print fabrics to get more subtle effects. The early pieces were mixed media: mostly fabric, but incorporating wire, card, beads, strange objects and anything else that achieved the right effect. The large quilts are more traditional in construction, being three layers, but without anything stuck on to the surface. I realized belatedly that I need to be able to roll them up to store them, as they take up a lot of room!

Was This Robotics Research Done Just As Setup For a Pun?

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Scalybot Snake robot on a plane! Georgia Tech

We had to laugh about this robot from Georgia Tech. To design it, researchers put snakes on a plane - an inclined surface - and watched them slither.

The result is actually cool: a robot that can climb up an inclined surface, called Scalybot 2, which mimics the rectilinear motion of snakes. It would not have been possible without the placement of some snakes on a plane. (Hat tip, Inside Science News Service.)

David Hu, an assistant mechanical engineering and biology professor, and Hamid Marvi, a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech, have been studying videos of snakes moving around, watching their slithering motions. The team designed Scalybot prototypes that can alter their friction to climb around. The researchers presented their work at an American Physical Society meeting this week.

It's pretty great when scientists can have some fun with their work, which Hu seems inclined to do. I have read through enough papers with titles like "Noonan syndrome-causing SHP2 mutants" (no offense to PNAS or anything) to welcome a little pop culture humor.

Here is Scalybot.

The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, February 27-March 2, 2012

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Laser Rainbow This laser rainbow projection is a project from artist Yvette Mattern. It's a kind of a promotion for the London Olympics; it'll shine along the North Tyneside coastline for four days. Bethany Clarke/Getty Images

This week's image roundup includes laser rainbows, cars exploding, a bat with the weirdest nose we have ever seen on an animal we didn't drunkenly draw ourselves as part of a board game, edible silk, and a moth that (if we irresponsibly exaggerate to the point of sheer fiction, abandoning all pretense of scientific accuracy or objective reporting) can and will literally eat you whole. Enjoy!


Click to see the most amazing images of the week.

Meet Your New Robot Receptionist, the DARPA ARM 'Bot

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Recepto-Bot DARPA
Never worry about answering the phone or stapling documents again

Bad news for long-term receptionists: DARPA's ARM (Autonomous Robotic Manipulation) robot can perform a whopping 18 different reception-ready tasks, from stapling to answering the phone to...turning on a lamp? Grasping things? Also it can't speak, or redirect calls, really, but it can drill a hole in a piece of wood, which I'm not entirely sure I can do, so it's an easy shoo-in for our incredibly prestigious Robot of the Week award. Congratulations! Watch the video after the jump.

This particular robot has apparently been around for about two years, so it's pretty impressive that they've gotten it this far. It's not trained to do this stuff--it uses visual and touch sensors to see and feel the shape of objects and interact with them accordingly, basically the same way we do. It'll eventually be used in military applications where it'll have to rely on its own senses to operate.

[via Wired]


This Week in the Future, February 27-March 2, 2012

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This Week in the Future, February 27-March 2, 2012 Baarbarian

Aw, this is cute. This robot is so in love with Mona (or is motivated by her red lipstick, whatever) that he draws a heart. Only it's a robot heart. With no heartbeat. Look, just because a robot can sketch a person's face doesn't mean it understands all the intricacies of visual art or the complexities of love.

Want to win this robotically artistic Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

Smart, Self-Healing Hydrogels Repair Themselves After Sustaining Damage

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UC San Diego's Self-Healing, Squishy Hydrogels Joshua Knoff, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

The ability to heal--to repair oneself repeatedly and thus sustain damage repeatedly--is one of biology's greatest tricks, and one that humans have been trying to replicate in synthetic materials for years. Now, bioengineers at University of California, San Diego, have done so via a hydrogel that could be something of a game-changer in disciplines like medicine and materials science.

Hydrogels are semi-solid, gummy-bear-like squishy materials made of chains of hydrophilic polymer molecules. That hydrophilic quality makes them a good analog for natural tissues because, due to their high water content, they tend to mimic the flexibility and other textural qualities of biological media. As such, they are often used in medical applications--as scaffolds for tissue engineering, for instance, or as drug delivery systems--but thus far attempts to make them repair themselves after a cut or tear is introduced have come up short.

The UCSD team found that the key to making hydrogels self-heal was creating a means by which polymer chains that have been cut can find and latch onto each other. Then they set to work making it happen via mechanisms they call "dangling side chain" molecules, which are pretty much exactly what they sound like. Like fingers hanging from the main structure of the polymer chains, they give a chain that's been damaged something to grab on to. Through computer simulations, the team found that the length of these dangling side chains plays a crucial role in the ability to self-heal, and that by optimizing this length they could make a hydrogel with a surprisingly strong ability for self-repair.

Further, the strength of the bond established when one of the hydrogels self-heals can be manipulated by the pH level of a surrounding solution. So, for instance, in an environment with low pH the hydrogel fuses rather strongly, while at higher pH levels the bond is weakened. That characteristic makes it ideal for working in applications where acid is present, whether that's suturing up a perforated stomach or creating a protective lining for containers that hold caustic, acidic materials.

Of course, that only makes sense for the particular hydrogel the team has in the lab now. Next, the bioengineers hope to create a variety of hydrogels that fuse and separate at different pH values, widening their applications to environments that aren't necessarily acidic. Such hydrogels could potentially lead to a new generation of self-healing plastics and other synthetic materials that can sustain and bounce back from repeated damage, just like the human body.

Could Iran's Ultra-Tough Concrete Withstand Bunker-Busting Bombs?

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Exploding Concrete Wikimedia Commons

Iran may not impress us with its flying saucer drones, but the country does at least one thing better than anyone else: Make concrete. Iran is in an earthquake zone, and its engineers make some of the world's toughest building materials, which could conceivably withstand small earthquakes.

Or, as it happens, artificially-induced earth shaking. Like from bombs.

Apparently our own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, is worried that American bunker-busters may not be able to penetrate Iran's deepest bunkers, especially considering Iran's smart ultra-high performance concrete. The Economist explains how Iranian concrete mixers dope their material with quartz powder and special fibers, which allow the concrete to withstand higher pressure and remain rigid even in shaky conditions.

High-performance concrete can be used for plenty of legitimate, peaceful purposes, like constructing safer bridges, tunnels and dams, making stronger sewer pipes and even soaking up pollution. And Iran is far from the only country looking at tougher concrete - a few years ago, MIT scientists studied how nano-deformations in concrete can destabilize it, and examined how silica fumes could improve concrete recipes.

But a special concrete designed to survive shaking could also be used to protect secret underground nuclear facilities from attack. Iran has at least considered this use, having studied their souped-up concrete's ability to withstand steel projectiles, the Economist says.

This is especially worrisome in the face of rising tensions amid "loose talk of war," as President Obama put it Sunday. Here's hoping Iran's concrete will not be put to the test anytime soon.

[The Economist]

By the Numbers: Flu Season, Visualized

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Flu Season Pitch Interactive

Strains of seasonal influenza behave slightly differently season to season and strain to strain. The differences are revealing. The rate of transmission of the 1918 pandemic, which killed 40 million people, closely mirrors the data from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. The two strains are, in fact, closely related. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), epidemiologists study the patterns of flu data from the current season against historic data. The comparison helps them make informed decisions about how to respond to the virus: what kind of vaccine to make, how to make it, and how and where to distribute it. As data sets improve, scientists will be able to better predict how future strains of seasonal influenza will spread.

See the infographic in full here.

The Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Spaceplane Celebrates Its First Full Year in Orbit

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Well, we're celebrating anyhow--there's no telling what it's actually doing

NASA may no longer possess a reusable vehicle for traveling to and from low earth orbit, but the United States Air Force has all but established a permanent presence up there. Maybe you've forgotten about the X-37B, the USAF's pilotless, reusable space plane that's been in orbit since launching on March 5, 2011, but it's still up there making laps. Today marks the first day of its second year in continuous orbit, a milestone for the mysterious program that the Air Force will tell us virtually nothing about.

The current flight is the second trip to orbit for the X-37B program and the first for this particular spacecraft, which is sometimes simply called the Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV. Another X-37B completed a 244-day mission in 2010. The Air Force plans to put that other X-37B back into orbit this fall, but it hasn't said when OTV currently in orbit will be coming back to Earth.

Its current route and ongoing mission are closely guarded secrets--the Air Force simply says the X-37Bs are testing technologies and leaves it at that--but amateur skygazers and satellite watchers say the OTV is looping the Earth on a track common for intelligence satellites. One of the program's goals is presumably to establish methods for quickly and regularly turning a reusable space plane around for multiple, rapid-fire missions into orbit. But its payload bay--the contents of which are unknown outside the program--has the capacity to carry any number of space-based tools.

Maybe X-37B is up there simply observing the weather--but probably not. Whatever you're up to up there, oh intrepid X-37B, here's to your first full year in orbit.

[Discovery News]

FBI Arrests Members of LulzSec Hacking Group, With Help From the Inside

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This Is Sabu via Fox News

Fox News revealed this morning the identity of the man who's been assisting the FBI in their takedown of LulzSec, a hacker group loosely associated with Anonymous that's variously referred to as a group of "hacktivists," "pranksters," and "cyber terrorists," and is responsible for attacks against government agencies like the CIA and FBI in addition to corporations like Sony. According to Fox News, the FBI arrested one Hector Xavier Monsegur back in August. Monsegur has been helping the FBI track down and arrest other members of the group ever since--and he's been in a good position to do so, since he's is also known as Sabu, the original leader of LulzSec. More analysis over at Gizmodo.

Hubble Catches a Warped Spiral Galaxy in Profile

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ESO 510-13: Warped Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), C. Conselice (U. Wisconsin/STScI) et al., NASA

The Hubble Heritage Team captured the warped structure of spiral galaxy ESO 510-13 so beautifully in this pretty space pic. Behold, the product of galactic collisions.

At least, that's one theory. Most spiral galaxies are flat disks made up of millions of stars and gas and planets and whatnot orbiting a galactic center (which is thought to be, at least in the case of large galaxies, a supermassive black hole). These disks are thought to flatten out the way they do by the nature of the collision of gas clouds early in a galaxy's lifespan.

But aberrations occur. Even our own Milky Way may have a small warp in it. In the case of ESO 510-13, that warping is pronounced. Some astronomers theorize that the warped nature of some galaxies is the product of gravitational interactions between galaxies or perhaps even by collisions between them. We're not really sure how ESO 510-13 got so bent out of shape, but it even at 150 million light years away it makes for an interesting profile.

[APOD]


Video: Meet Piccolo, the Pocket-Sized CNC-Robot That Draws What You Design

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Piccolo, the Tiny CNC-Bot
For less than $70

It's no secret that PopSci loves robots, but even we think they have some shortcomings--mainly that there aren't more of them everywhere doing everything, from the very big to the very small. Plus, robots are expensive and often complicated. But not Piccolo. This pocket-sized CNC platform from London shop Diatom Studio turns your ideas into high-quality doodlings for less than $70.

Right now the Piccolo is still in prototype stage, but soon enough the Arduino-compatible platform will allow those of us with the least artistic acumen to turn our visions into beautiful back-of-the-envelope schematics and cocktail-napkin diagrams. Says Piccolo's Web site:

Piccolo is a pocket-sized stand-alone CNC platform. For under $70, you will be able to assemble your personal Arduino-compatible kit for tinkering, and playing with basic CNC output. Be it plotting a quick graffiti, printing a one-off business card on the fly, or multiple Piccolos working together to create a large mural, this kit provides a platform for experimenting with 2D or 3D digital fabrication at a small scale.

That's pretty neat, even though its working space is a bit limited because of its small size. The finished product will include Arduino and Processing libraries so users can experiment with their Piccolos as well. Which means Piccolo isn't just an inexpensive sketch-bot, but potentially a really interesting learning tool. More details and a demo in the video below.

Piccolo the tiny CNC-bot from diatom studio on Vimeo.

[via Co.Design]

Video: Lego Space Shuttle Lifts Off for the Stratosphere

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Lego Shuttle via YouTube

So many intrepid stratonauts send stuff into the upper atmosphere these days, it's almost hard to keep track - there's even a suborbital balloon factory now. But this weather balloon experiment still caught my eye. It's a little space shuttle, winging its way into orbit one more time...in Lego form.

Romanian shuttle enthusiast Raul Oaida posted this video to YouTube of his hand-made Lego Space Shuttle kit to prove that "although retired, this machine can still fly, albeit in toy form." He filled a weather balloon with helium and rigged it with a GPS device and a high-definition camera, launching on New Year's Eve from a field in central Germany. He used the GPS to recover the device 240 kilometers south of where it launched.

The tiny shuttle's max altitude was 35,000 meters, or roughly 21 miles, merely a fraction of the 200-odd miles the real thing used to attain on a semi-regular basis. But it's nice to once again see this shape in front of a dark horizon, isn't it?

[via FastCo Exist]

Stowaway Seeds Carried By Unwitting Humans Are Colonizing Antarctica

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Mt. Herschel, Antarctica Andrew Mandemaker via Wikimedia

Seeds are surreptitiously hitching a ride on human visitors to Antarctica, threatening to sow invasive species in one of the last remaining pristine environments on Earth. About 20 percent of visitors to the frozen continent bring stowaway seeds on their clothing and luggage, according to a new study. The research highlights the potential risk to Antarctica's indigenous species, but also the impressive traveling abilities of plants.

Researchers led by Steven Chown of Stellenbosch University in South Africa vacuumed the clothing, shoes, camera bags and walking poles of 853 Antarctic visitors during the International Polar Year in 2007-2008. They figure that represented about 2 percent of the continent's visitors that year.

The team found 2,686 seeds on these people, a group that included both scientists and tourists. The researchers extrapolate this to mean that 31,732 seeds entered the Antarctic on tourists, and 38,897 seeds entered on scientists during the first summer of the International Polar Year. Scientists were by far worse offenders, bringing twice as many seeds as individual tourists, but tourists still greatly outnumber science-related visitors.

Unsurprisingly, many of the seeds were from plant species found in cold regions, because most visitors to the southern continent spent some time in cold climates before their Antarctic trips. But this is bad news for pristine Antarctica, because cold-adapted plants would be more likely to survive there. The team has already found some examples of this, spotting bluegrass in the highly visited Ronne, Amery and Ross ice shelves. And a warming climate will only make things better for the plants.

The researchers recommend further studies to look at the prevailing winds, tracking of seabirds and genetic data of plants to establish natural baselines for seed dispersal. And though they don't say it, one solution seems pretty obvious - people should clean their clothes before disembarking. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[via PhysOrg]

Gray Matter: In Which I Dip My Finger In Molten Lead

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Braving The Elements The metal reached temperatures of more than 500°F. Mike Walker
The true test of trust in science

Last year, I stuck my hand in super-cold liquid nitrogen for the amusement of PopSci readers. My skin survived that demonstration, but I wimped out on a related experiment at the opposite extreme: dipping my finger into molten lead. That's because the only time I've ever burned myself badly enough to need a doctor was while casting a lead plaque as a kid.

But life is too short to cower in the dark, afraid of a little molten metal. I knew that the antidote to my fear was science; I trusted the Leidenfrost effect to keep me safe. When my finger hits molten lead that's hot enough, moisture from my finger should be vaporized instantly, creating an insulating layer of steam that should protect me for a fraction of a second. (This is a mirror image of what happened when I put my hand in liquid nitrogen, where the heat from my hand was hot enough to instantly vaporize the nitrogen, similarly creating an insulating layer of gas.)

The "hot enough" part is key. If the metal is just barely molten, not enough steam is created, and some of the lead may solidify onto the finger, where it would rapidly transfer enough heat to cause a serious burn. So I had to get the temperature well beyond that level, test the metal with a hot dog, and then go for it.

In place of lead, I used nontoxic plumbing solder, which has a melting point of around 400°F. When the temperature got up to 500°, I inserted my pinkie finger-and didn't feel a thing. I managed to come away unscathed even though my finger was in the liquid past the knuckle long enough for me to splash around a bit. OK, according to the high-speed video we shot, it was only about one sixth of a second, but it was long enough to cure my childhood fear of molten lead for good.

An earlier demonstration of the Leidenfrost effect shows the author's entire hand in -320° liquid nitrogen. For further details click here

Tevatron Finds Hints of Higgs Boson, Just Where CERN Sniffed it Last Winter

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Tevatron Somewhere in those big rings a tiny particle may be hiding. U.S. Department of Energy
Posthumous results from Fermilab's accelerator

Before it stopped colliding for good, America's defunct Tevatron collider saw a hint of the elusive Higgs boson, physicists announced Wednesday. Even more interesting: Scientists spotted something unusual in the same energy range where their European colleagues glimpsed something unusual at the Large Hadron Collider last winter.

Looking through nearly a decade of particle collision data, Tevatron researchers reported an excess of events, which is physics parlance for a promising sign of a new particle, that could be caused by a Higgs boson. The mass of this particle would be between 117 and 131 GeV. Last winter, LHC scientists reported seeing excesses in the range of 124 to 125 GeV. The Tevatron finding had a statistical significance of 2.6 sigma, which is not enough to say it's really there, but enough to keep looking.

If they had gotten more funding, Tevatron scientists could have done that, and may have found the Higgs first, scientists told Nature News.

In December, two separate CERN teams reported signals with standard deviations of 3.6 sigma and 2.6 sigma, and in February, the CMS and ATLAS experiments again announced some promising signals. Those numbers were revised down today at the same Italian conference where the Tevatron numbers were announced. Generally, a 5 sigma confidence would be considered a true discovery.

The hunt for the Higgs boson is one of the most complicated and crucial quests in all of science. The particle is thought to endow other particles with mass, and could help explain why the universe is made of something rather than nothing. Physicists don't even agree on what it will look like, but most seem pretty confident that the LHC will find it later this year. Nature News has the full rundown.

[Nature News]

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