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German Police To Experiment With 3-D Printed Guns

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The Liberator 3-D Printed Gun

Defense Distributed

They aim to determine whether 3-D printed firearms present a real threat-and whether they can use the weapons for their own purposes.

German federal police forces are getting into the 3-D printing business. Responding to a question posed by the Left Party in parliament, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, the Federal Criminal Police) and the Bundespolizei (BPOL, the Federal Police) purchased a 3-D printer to see how easy it would be to make weapons that could successfully bypass airport security checks. They also want to see if the technology has any potential police use.

Authorities have been-perhaps rightfully-a little bit worried about the average crazy Joe being able to print a 3-D killer weapon at home since Defense Distributed posted the designs to its first completely 3-D printed gun in early May.

New York City politicians rushed to float the idea of banning 3-D printed guns, as did one California state senator. Others were more cautious about seeing what this whole plastic gun thing was all about.

The German police agencies have reportedly been chatting with their colleagues in New South Wales, Australia, who earlier this summer spent $35 to print Defense Distributed's design, the Liberator. The New South Wales police commissioner warned in May that the gun misfired catastrophically during testing, exploding into pieces.

Though the Liberator proved difficult to recreate in a manner that wouldn't explode, people are already out there improving on Cody Wilson's designs. It's probably wise for police forces to get a handle on what these types of weapons can do before they run into them on duty. How the agencies themselves might benefit from easily concealable plastic guns with a tendency to fall apart upon firing is another question.

[GigagOM]

    



Watch A Robot Crack A Smartphone Passcode Using Brute Force

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Next up: ATM PINs.

A team of engineers attending next week's Black Hat hacking conference created R2B2, the incredibly patient Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher. The 'bot punches four-digit combinations at a rate of about one-per-second until it breaks past a phone's security screen. Working at that rate, it can break through an Android phone in under 20 hours.

It can't get through any phone's security, though: the iPhone, by default, makes users wait more and more time to try again after each incorrect passcode, meaning R2B2 couldn't hack in during a reasonable amount of time. Android phones, by default, only make users wait 30 seconds to try again after every five incorrect codes. (Don't fret too much: it's not like most petty thieves have the Arduino and 3-D printing skills required to build this robot.)

The creators say they're looking into making a version that could crack ATM pins or bank vaults, which would be a little scary (although wouldn't a bystander figure something was up when a robot was punching numbers into an ATM for 20 hours?)

[Forbes via Gizmodo]

    


100 Years Of Meteorites In An Interactive Image [Infographic]

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More meteorites have crashed into Earth than you expect, probably

This interactive infographic, from designer Sebastian Sadowski, charts 100 years of meteorites, mapping them by where they fell and when. You can explore the number of meteorites that fell in India over the past century, then see how that stacks up to Brazil. Or, if you'd prefer, you can look at a specific timeframe, be it a year or 100 years (Mexico apparently had a run of meteorites falling in the late 1970s).

We've seen awesome meteorite visualizations before, but putting the meteorite strikes on a globe really shows how widespread they are. In fact, it's hard to find a spot that hasn't been touched by meteorites at some point in the last century. For example: think you're safe on the 7,000-mile square island of New Caledonia? Nope. A tiny meteorite struck in 1936.

[visualizing.org]

    


Google Announces New Tablet And Streaming TV Stick Thing

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Google Chromecast

Google

This might be the cheapest internet-streaming TV device we've ever seen!

Today in San Francisco, Google announced a few intriguing new products--two hardware, one software. One is an updated version of our favorite Android tablet, one is the newest version of Android, and one is something that's not quite like anything else. Let's get into it!

Chromecast

By far the most interesting thing announced at today's event was the Chromecast, a very small stick that reminds us a little bit of the Roku Streaming Stick. It's a two-inch-long dongle that looks more like a USB flash drive than anything else, but in fact it plugs into the HDMI port on your TV. It's not really like a Roku or an Apple TV, though; there's not actually an interface, and there's no remote.

Instead, you find the content on your phone or tablet and beam it to the Chromecast, just like beaming something from a phone to an Apple TV via AirPlay. In the Youtube, Netflix, music, or video app on your phone, there'll be a little icon on the "now playing" screen. Tap it and a list of places to send the song or video will pop up; hit "living room" (or whatever you've named your Chromecast) and bam, it'll start playing on your TV.

Currently, the Chromecast only supports Netflix and Youtube on iOS, and adds in the native music and video player if you're using an Android phone or tablet. Google says they'll try to add more (perhaps Hulu Plus, Amazon, Crackle, or HBO Go?) but given Google's history with video streamers, who knows. One odd thing: it's not powered by the HDMI port, like the Roku Streaming Stick (which requires a fancy, semi-rare sort of HDMI port, but still). That means it has to get power from somewhere, and that somewhere looks to be USB. If your TV has a USB port on it, cool, plug 'er right into that as well. If not, well, you'll have to run a cord down to your trusty power strip, which is a bummer.

The key thing about the Chromecast? It only costs $35. Yow! And then there's this: "Once your Chromecast ships, you will recieve an email with a promotional code for 3 months of Netflix. Offer valid for previous, new and existing Netflix members, one per Netflix account." That means if you're currently paying the $8 minimum for streaming Netflix, or if you decide to sign up, you can subtract $24 from that price, bringing the cost down to about the price of a decent sandwich and a bag of chips. You can buy it here.

Nexus 7, Part 2

The Nexus 7 is our favorite Android tablet, and Google just announced a new version that looks like it'll build on everything we liked about it before. The new one has the same sized screen, but trims down the bezel and the body so it's smaller and lighter than before. The screen, by the way, is a huge upgrade, with a 1920x1200 resolution and a 323 pixels-per-inch density. That's super high; Apple would call it a "Retina" screen, but we'll just call it super crisp and clear.

It's also got a faster processor than before (a quad-core Snapdragon, if that's the kind of thing that interests you), double the memory (up to 2GB of RAM), dual stereo speakers, both a front and rear camera (the previous version only had a front-facing camera, which we kind of liked), and an array of new sensors and options (Bluetooth 4.0, near-field communication, wireless charging). The battery life has been extended by an hour or so; Google says you'll get 9 hours of "HD" video watching out of it.

The Nexus 7 also comes with the newest version of Android, another update to "Jelly Bean" with a new version number (4.3) but still keeping the name. Doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed on the user front; there are new parental controls for multiple profiles, so you can make sure your kid doesn't use your awesome porn apps, but that's about all that was announced.

The new Nexus 7 will be available in three models: a 16GB and 32GB model with only Wi-Fi, for $229 and $269, respectively, and a 32GB model with 4G LTE for $349. The LTE model works with any of America's LTE networks (that'd be Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile), and all the models are significantly cheaper than the equivalent iPad Mini model--with much more powerful specs, to boot.

Read more about the Nexus 7 here.

    


Getting Heart Surgery? Wait For The Full Moon

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Waning Full Moon

Wikimedia Commons

Surgeries during a waning full moon have lower mortality rates and shorter hospital stays, according to a new study.

It sounds a bit like an old wives tale, but if you're in the market for a cardiac surgery, you may want to keep a watchful eye on the moon.

A recent study at Rhode Island Hospital found that patients who underwent aortic dissection during the waning full moon were less likely to die, and spent less time in the hospital overall--10 days during the full moon cycle versus 14 days at other times of the month. (Interestingly, men who had an additional cardiac procedure while at the hospital also healed faster.)

Other studies have postulated that the lunar cycle affects more than just tides. Maximum deaths from cardiovascular emergencies occurred during the first and last quarters of the moon's cycle, according to a 1989 report. The new moon has been associated with increased risk of a ruptured aneurysm.

How exactly the phenomenon works remains uncertain. Are there mini tides in your blood? Probably not. "Although the gravitational force exerted by the moon on oceans may be significantly powerful to produce the high and low tides," the researchers write, "its effect on minuscule objects such as human beings is estimated to be a rather small force by Newtonian Laws and is not well understood."

Timing affects medical outcomes in other, maybe more intuitive ways. Some studies have found medical errors and mortality rates increase during July, when medical students begin their residencies, for instance, and risks of anesthesia complications increase later in the day, possibly because those administering the drugs get tired. Doctors are only human, after all.

So here's some unsolicited medical advice: the moon is currently in a waning phase. So quick! Go get heart surgery!

    


New Surveillance Blimp Stays Aloft For 30 Days Straight

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Raytheon's JLENS Blimp

U.S. Army

A new U.S. Army project could make threat detection much more practical.

The Army may have a new radar-carrying, unmanned blimp by 2017. Made by Raytheon, the Pentagonese-named Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) completed six weeks of early testing with about 100 soldiers on June 14.

The testing included an endurance test in which JLENS was airborne for 20 days, though the production version should be able to stay aloft for 30 days. Soldiers also tested the control system. (Those with video game and Xbox experience seemed to have an easy time of it.) The next major step for the JLENS program is testing at proving grounds at Aberdeen, Md., from 2014 to 2017.

The system consists of two 243-foot-long blimps. Floating in the air as high as 10,000 feet, the blimps can detect threats as far away as 340 miles. One blimp carries a 360-degree surveillance radar to scan for threats as they emerge on the horizon. The second blimp carries a fire-control radar, which uses a narrow-focused radar, fired more frequently, to track a target as it moves.

Together, the two radar-equipped blimps can detect and track airplanes, drones, boats, and missiles, as well as ground targets like cars or tanks. In earlier testing, JLENS successfully guided a missile to shoot down another missile, including once over land in April 2012 and once over sea in September 2012.

Because of the low cost to deploy the unmanned blimps and the even lower cost of keeping them in the air, the system provides a far more durable and economical means of overhead radar surveillance for a military base or operation. Radar systems on the ground have problems detecting objects beneath a certain height. Previously, this problem was solved by a specialized jet flying overhead, which is great on a mission or for an army on the move, but isn't practical for defending a base or as static surveillance. Blimps provide that same angle of radar and can watch a base for up to a month at a time. It's an ideal watchtower.

Watch a video explaining JLENS below:

Correction: This article originally stated that the JLENS was airborne for 10 days during endurance testing. It was actually airborne for 20 days. We apologize for the error.

    


How Close Could I Get To The Sun And Survive?

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The sun, ooh

NASA

Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940°F, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can't hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back. You can get surprisingly close. The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up.

That said, an astronaut so close to the sun is way, way out of position. "The technology in our current space suits really isn't designed to withstand deep space," says Ralph McNutt, an engineer working on the heat shielding for NASA's Messenger, a new robotic Mercury probe. The standard space suit will keep an astronaut relatively comfortable at external temperatures reaching up to 248°. Heat coming off the sun dissipates over distance, but a person drifting in space would begin encountering that kind of heat (the five-yard line) some three million miles from the sun. "It would then be a matter of time before the astronaut died," McNutt says. Above 248°, the suit would transform into a close-fitting sauna-the temperature would climb above 125° and the person would become dehydrated and pass out, eventually dying of heatstroke.

Riding in the space shuttle, though, someone could get much closer to our star. The ship's reinforced carbon-carbon heat shield is designed to withstand temperatures of up to 4,700° to ensure that the spacecraft and its passengers can survive the friction heat generated when it reenters the atmosphere from orbit. If the shield wrapped the entire shuttle, McNutt says, astronauts could fly to within 1.3 million miles of the sun (roughly the two-yard line). But the integrity of the shield degrades rapidly above 4,700°, and the cockpit would begin to cook. "I would advise turning away from the sun well before that point," McNutt says. Much hotter than that, the shields would fail altogether, and the vehicle would combust in less than a minute.

Of course, just getting that close to the sun would be quite an accomplishment, says NASA radiation-health officer Eddie Semones. The constant exposure to cosmic radiation during the voyage would most likely prove fatal before the astronauts crossed the 50-yard line.

This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Popular Science magazine.

    


Vintage Big Pic: The Cameras That Captured The First Men On The Moon

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Apollo Lunar TV Camera

Westinghouse Engineer

Yep, these are photos of cameras. Enjoy!

This smooth and shiny camera captured the video that folks at home watched live on TV during Neil Armstrong's moonwalk. It's called the Apollo Lunar TV Camera, and the U.S. engineering firm Westinghouse designed it. It withstood vibrations between 10 and 2,000 cycles per second, shocks of more than 8G during launch and landing, extreme pressure changes, and temperatures ranging from -300 degrees Fahrenheit to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a summary Westinghouse published in 1968.

The camera in this particular picture may not be the exact camera that went to the moon. Westinghouse made a number of identical cameras for testing the moon cam's environmental hardiness.

The camera's main job was to capture video for broadcast in America. Its secondary mission was to capture images for scientific study. Apollo 11 also carried other cameras dedicated to getting photos for researchers.

The Lunar TV Camera captured images at 10 frames per second, which is pretty low, compared to, say, the contemporary film industry standard of 24 frames per second. Nevertheless, Westinghouse deemed 10 frames per second acceptable because "astronauts cannot move quickly in a spacesuit."

The camera above, called the data camera, was one of three Hasselblad 500EL models that the Apollo 11 team carried with them into space. It was the only Hasselblad the team used on the surface of the moon; astronauts carried it mounted on the fronts of their suits.

NASA has had a long relationship with the Sweden-based Hasselblad, which made nearly all of the cameras U.S. astronauts carried with them on early space missions. After 1963, Hasselblad modified its cameras for NASA, giving them big levers and other fixes to make them easier for suited astronauts to manipulate.

The data camera had some additional modifications. It had a glass Reseau plate, engraved with a grid, that went between the film magazine and the camera body. The plate gave every photo an overlay of small crosses that researchers could use to calibrate distances in photos. This was the first time camera-makers put a Reseau plate in a small, relatively inexpensive camera.

Because it was carried onto the surface of the moon, the data camera also featured a silver-colored finish to help it maintain its interior temperatures better. All its interior lubricants had to be removed or reformulated so they wouldn't boil off in a vacuum.

    



The One True Streaming TV Device

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Sling To Chromecast

Google

The way to success is not to eliminate 90 percent of features and cut the price by 60 percent. Why not make the One True Streaming TV Thing?

Google just announced their new Chromecast device, a very small stick thing that plugs into your TV and allows you to play videos or music on your TV. It costs $35, and if you're a Netflix subscriber you'll get credited three months free, bringing the price essentially down to $11, so people are very excited about it.

So here's how Chromecast works: you start streaming a video on your phone, tablet or computer's browser. If it is a particular kind of video--for example a Netflix video--there will be a little button you can press. Hit that button and you'll get a little popup saying "would you like to play this on your TV?" (I'm paraphrasing here). Say yes and your TV will start playing that video instead of your phone/tablet/browser. Your TV is blank throughout this whole process, until you say "yes"--you do all your searching and browsing and selecting on some other gadget. This process doesn't really have a name, as far as I know, so I'm going to call it "slinging." It's different than streaming; the Netflix app on your phone streams Netflix videos, but Chromecast lets you sling those videos to your TV. You can sling the stream, see? For example, AirPlay, which you can use on the Apple TV, is a slinging feature.

In our haste to crown a gadget the king of its category simply because it's the newest member of that category, we sometimes forget about the humble, older gadgets that might still be the better fit for most customers.

The interesting thing about the Chromecast is that it isolates a single feature found in some other streaming TV products, eliminates everything else, and cuts the price and size down. Apple TV has a Chromecast in it, essentially, but the Chromecast eliminates 90 percent of what the Apple TV can do and cuts the price by two-thirds. Google thinks that one feature, the slinging feature, is enough to carry its product.

Google isn't necessarily wrong; the idea is that you can offload lots of the stuff you'd normally do with a remote while looking at the TV to your phone. Instead of click-click browsing on your TV, you just browse on your phone. Instead of having to support yet another version of apps like Netflix and Youtube for the TV, Google can just say screw it, use the ones on your phone. This makes sense!

But there are lots of obstacles to adoption. The first and maybe most important is that this is very simply not how most people are used to watching things on their TVs. Apple TV and Roku and Xbox are familiar because they're not really that far removed from the way we've been watching TV for decades before the internet came along. Apps are really just channels; in fact, Roku calls its apps "channels." Pick up the remote, click over to the channel you want, click over to the show or movie you want, play. It takes very little learning.

The concept of slinging, in which you play content on your phone before magically beaming it via Wi-Fi to a stick plugged into your TV--that's at least one alien new step that most people haven't messed around with, and alien new steps are always major barriers to mainstream adoption.

Another major problem is that I simply do not trust Google to develop the Chromecast in the way it needs to be developed for its vision to succeed. It's confusing at the moment! You can sling content to the Chromecast with any of several devices--iPhone, Android phone, laptop running the Chrome browser--but they can't all play all types of videos. Right now, the Chromecast only supports Netflix and Youtube through all of those. If you sling content to the Chromecast with an Android phone or tablet, you can use the music and video app that plays stuff you've got on your phone (for example, a TV show you've bought and downloaded from the Google Play store, or an album you've synced onto your phone from your computer). With a computer using the Chrome browser, Google says you can sling "any video content," be it Hulu, HBO Go, or something else entirely. Assuming that's true--which is a big assumption, given the wildly divergent types of video players and security for those video players on the web--it requires that people control their TVs with their computers. People generally do not like doing this, otherwise we'd all just plug our computers directly into our TVs.

If that sounds confusing, I've sort of proved my point. This is confusing!

Google also has a spectacularly lousy history of supporting its TV products; if you can actually remember what the Google TV and Nexus Q even were, I'd be surprised, and if you own either, I'd assume you're also a professional gadget reviewer who received a free one from Google. Google says they're releasing an SDK (software developer's kit) so that the developers who make video apps like Hulu and HBO Go can make their iPhone and Android apps work with the Chromecast--but will they? I wouldn't put my money on it, even if it's a pretty small amount of money.

And that also completely ignores the pleasure of navigating a pretty interface on a TV. Apple TV and even Roku, lately, have turned their interfaces into something pretty special. Browsing through one of these devices shows huge movie posters and album art; metadata like directors, actors, and plot synopses; and beautiful animations. Compare that to the Chromecast experience: pick up your phone and scroll through a tiny app. Why use your giant TV if you're not going to use it to its fullest? And imagine the awkwardness of browsing and selecting a title if you're not alone. What do you do, read out the titles to your guests as you scroll through on your phone? Does everyone crowd around you? Do you just take control like a living-room despot?

The main draw of the Chromecast is its price, which is admittedly absurdly cheap. But, um, the Roku HD, which has a lovely interface, universal search, and support for hundreds of apps, costs $50 on Amazon. It doesn't have a slinging feature like Chromecast or Apple TV's Airplay, that's true, but it does have Plex, which sucks up all of the videos on any computer in your house and organizes them by category and title, pulling in all that delicious metadata from online databases so you can browse by cover art.

The Apple TV costs $95 on Amazon--a lot more money, sure. But you get a lot more for your money (great interface, stellar hardware, support for the enormously popular Apple store, the combination of apps and a slinging feature), and it's also important to remember that these gadgets can help you get rid of cable entirely. An Apple TV costs about as much as one month's worth of cable. Suck it up, guys. It's not that expensive.

This isn't to say that I'm not excited by Chromecast; I think slinging is exceptionally cool, and I think it's great that this hardware so cheap and small. But I don't necessarily think that a device that does exclusively slinging, no matter how cheap it is, is a viable option for most people. It's best as part of a larger whole.

That larger whole will come, soon enough. It's a fun thought experiment to make a sort of frankengadget out of all of the devices; I want the Roku's ease of use and depth of content, the Apple TV's speed and beautiful interface, the Chromecast's device-agnostic beaming capabilities, the Boxee's live TV addition, and, hell, while I'm at it, I want the sports content from good old cable TV. And I want it for $100. Soon enough someone'll do this. But if you're going to cut the cord, you need more features to make up, not fewer.

    


New For Space Tourists: A Light, Comfy Space Suit

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The 3G Space Suit

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden checks out the suit on Capitol Hill.

Final Frontier Designs

Private space company Final Frontier Design shows off the latest orbital fashion.

Final Frontier Design, a Brooklyn, NY-based space company, unveiled their new "3G" space suit yesterday on Capitol Hill. The company's previous suit won a 2013 Popular Science invention award, and this third-generation suit builds on four years of research and development.

The space suit is safe for both suborbital and orbital commercial space travel. But Final Frontier's intentions reach beyond mere safety: the suit is also "comfortable, lightweight, and inexpensive" compared with other spacesuits, according to a press release.

Here are the cool features: A single-layer pressure garment system (two fused pieces of durable, airtight urethane-coated nylon) makes the suit comfortable and flexible, once inflated. It also has 13 adjustment points for sizing and a carbon-fiber waist ring to make it lighter. Finally, it has cooling loops for your head, chest, hands, and feet (so you don't overheat in there).

The company premiered the suit as part of NASA's "Tech Day on the Hill." Along with over 500 staff and guests, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden (pictured above) and 16 members of Congress were in attendance.

Space suits have sure come a long way over the years...

    


Watch These Magnetic Droplets Dance [Video]

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Bust a move, ferrofluids.


We're suckers for a fluid that can dance. These magnetic water droplets, or ferrofluids, can switch between a static self-assembling state-in which the structure organizes itself when the system reaches an energy equilibrium-and a dynamic state, in which the self-assembly is driven by continuous energy.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland and ESPCI Paris Tech created the model. It can reverse from static to dynamic and back again with an oscillating magnetic field.

"Over the years we have managed to create functional materials based on static self-assembled hierarchies. This model system paves the way towards even more versatile dynamic materials, wherein the structures are formed by feeding energy," one of the researchers involved, Olli Ikkala, said in a press statement.

Cool for physics nerds, but pretty mesmerizing for anyone else, too:

See the state-switching in action:

For more info, check out the research in Science.

    


The Three Biggest Aviation Advances From This Year

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Hover Craft

Engineers are designing the first major addition to the U.S. VTOL fleet in more than two decades. The plans are mostly secret, but the craft will likely draw from tilt-rotor, VTOL fixed-wing, and compound helicopter technologies.

Nick Kaloterakis

How RFID tags, carbon-fiber airframes, and battery sensors will change the course of flight.


RFID Tags

A regular addition to cellphones and bank cards, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are creeping into airplane cabins. With tags in life vests, seats, medical kits, and other frequently inspected equipment, attendants can cut down inspection times tenfold, saving money and improving plane turnarounds.

Carbon-Fiber Airframes

Carbon fiber is much stronger and stiffer than aluminum. Boeing's 787 Dreamliner was the first airliner to use a predominately carbon-fiber airframe. The Airbus A350 will join it this summer. The lighter frames allow increased fuel efficiency, and a stronger fuselage allows more comfortable cabin pressures.

Battery Sensors

Batteries are little black boxes of chemistry, and when they fail, it can be hard to diagnose the problem. Scientists at PARC have embedded batteries with fiber-optic sensors. With internal data, engineers could optimize performance in real time or pinpoint the source of a problem to fix the trouble in future designs.

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

    


Watch A Real-Life Drone Get Piloted Through The Oculus Rift

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The virtual reality headset goes in for real-reality instead.

The Oculus Rift is a virtual-reality headset that makes for a crazy-immersive experience. (Example: you can feel what it's like to get your head lopped off without actually getting it lopped off!) Turns out, it's a pretty cool gadget for real-reality experiences, too.

The engineers at Intuitive Aerial, a company that makes aerial camera rigs, hooked the Rift up to a drone's cameras, feeding a video stream through a Wi-Fi-connected laptop. That means the pilot can see what the drone sees, almost in real-time. (The latency's slight: just 120 milliseconds between the drone's cameras and the pilot.) But there's at least one problem with the rig: since the drone needs a Wi-Fi connection, it doesn't work past, at most, 100 meters. But still, the real world has pretty great resolution.

[Intuitive Aerial via Polygon]

    


Shooting The Most Beautiful Jellyfish

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Cyanea capillata

Alexander Semenov

Photographer Alexander Semenov takes some of the most gorgeous jellyfish pictures we've ever seen--and trust us, we've seen a lot of pictures of jellyfish. Our friends over at Popular Photography have a great interview with him, so you should head over to find out if, for example, he's ever been stung (answer: yes) and how debilitating it was (answer: very) in addition to some insights as to how to shoot some of the most otherworldly creatures on our own world. Check it out here.

    


This Documentary About A Microsoft Paint Artist Is Incredible

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If the story of 97-year-old Hal Lesko doesn't make you tear up, you are soulless.

Hal Lasko is a 97-year-old retired typographer who goes by the nickname Grandpa. (Not for the reason you'd expect; you should watch the video to find out why.) After he was diagnosed with an eye defect, Lasko's family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and, well, without spoiling too much, the results--both of his art and the story of his life--are beautifully captured by co-directors Josh Bogdan and Lasko's actual grandson, Ryan Lasko, in this short documentary called The Pixel Painter.

Keep a box of tissues nearby, folks.

[Vimeo via Laughing Squid]

    



Honeycomb Drone Swarm Can Fly In Any Shape

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Modular Drones in Flight

ETH Zurich

Happily, these drones are for educational (not killer) purposes.

These honeycomb-like drones use advanced networking technology to fly smoothly in large formations. Created as a teaching aid by researchers at ETH Zurich, the Distributed Flight Array consists of at least two modules, linked physically by magnets and electronically by push-pin connections.

Curiously, a single unit cannot fly on its own. The torque from a single rotor is unbalanced, and sends the drone tumbling erratically. Once connected, the units all take off as one, using their rotors, and then fly level to the ground, with sensors providing information about inertia and altitude. A human pilot steers the formation with a joystick.

Another version of the drone swarm, designed by the same Swiss team, uses latches instead of magnets and infrared signals instead of metal pins, but otherwise works the same way. To land, the formation turns off its rotors, and the individual units fall to the ground.

The point of the project was to demonstrate how distributed networks function. Distributed networks involve communication and processing tasks shared by many identical parts. Each module in the flight array records its own position and communicates that with all the others, then adjusts the strength and direction of rotor spin to balance out the whole array. (Read more about why coordinated swarms of robots are the future of flight.)

Here are the drones in action:

Here they are testing many possible configurations:

[Phys.Org]

    


What The Physics Of Love Looks Like [Video]

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Like drops of color in water, with some heavy breathing.

What Love Looks Like, video one of six from Tangible Graphics on Vimeo.

Louise Ma, a Brooklyn-based designer, has been exploring the visualization of one of our most pressing emotions in an ongoing project called What Love Looks Like. This video, the first in a six-part series, shows different kinds of relationships as different solubility of a liquid in water--the people that become a part of you, the people you'll always remember and those who don't matter at all.

Ma and her collaborators, Chris Parker and Lola Kalman, have posted two more videos you can check out here. One involves fire!

[FlowingData]

    


Big Pic: A Technicolor Galactic Explosion

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The Sculptor Galaxy

ESO

The new ALMA telescope snaps an amazing view of the Sculptor Galaxy.

The Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) only opened in March, but we've already got incredible images from the new telescope. Here's a recent look at the Sculptor Galaxy, a.k.a NGC 253, a spiral galaxy about 11.5 million light-years away.

The image shows cold gas being pushed out of the center of the galaxy by pressure created from young stars. That gives astronomers a window into a mystery: If some galaxies end up spewing out more gas (star-building fuel) than they take in, it would explain why some galaxies are much smaller than predictions would assume.

[ESO]

    


Why Neuromarketing Is A Neuroscam

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EEG

Petter Kallioinen via Wikimedia Commons

Poor data and poorer analysis do not make true scientific results.

As a rule, almost anything that involves the prefix neuro is probably a buzzword. Brains! They're the key to everything! Pretty pictures of brain scans or electrical pulses can reveal the depths of the human experience! We're even more likely to believe poor explanations of psychology when they're accompanied by gratuitous neuroscience jargon.

Perhaps no field is buzzier than neuromarketing, a concept invented in the 1990s by Harvard psychologists and now used by companies like Google, Frito-Lay and CBS. Neuromarketers operate on the principle that simple focus groups and surveys aren't enough to truly figure out what people want--marketing needs to tap into the subconscious parts of the brain. Marketers need to know what you want before you want it. And so neuromarketers co-opt the techniques of neuroscience--analyzing the brain's responses to products with electroencephalography (EEG) and MRI imaging. Brain-whispering, The New York Times called it a few years ago.

Now, Matt Wall argues over at Slate that neuromarketing doesn't produce solid data--and perhaps it never can.

Scientists use electroencephalography (EEG) to measure electric activity in the brain during some kind of task in the lab (like looking at certain kinds of images). In the last couple years, neuromarketers have embraced cheap, user-friendly EEG systems that claim to work with dry sensors, removing the need to dab messy conductive gel on someone's head. It's more efficient than expensive, bulky MRI machines, but it comes with a price.

The messy, long process of applying electrodes to the scalp ensures the best quality data:

Modern research-grade EEG systems can use up to 256 separate electrodes, and fixing them to a subject's head using conductive gel (in order to get the best possible connection) is a messy business that can take several hours.
The dry-contact systems with one sensor or a few can record only the most basic kind of data, and they do so with much lower fidelity and reliability.

And there's often just not enough data, or sophisticated analysis, to ensure the reliability of the subsequent findings:

The signal-to-noise ratio in EEG data is poor, so sophisticated filtering and analysis techniques are required to pull out the weak signal from the background noise. Because of this poor signal-to-noise property, large numbers of repetitive trials are required in an experiment, and large numbers of subjects are also needed to demonstrate a reliable effect.
In general the same applies to getting information out of a data set as to getting information out of a human: If you torture it long enough, it'll tell you everything you want to know, but information extracted under torture is highly unreliable. In addition, marketing-related studies are not well-suited to the kind of repetition that's required to boost the useful signal and reduce noise; the same product or TV commercial can be presented only a few times before the participant becomes very bored indeed and therefore ceases to have any kind of meaningful reaction.

These technical issues could, in theory, be solved by changing the experimental design or upgrading the equipment, but Wall points out that there's a larger issue with neuromarketing that will remain an impediment to getting any good scientific results: reverse inference.

Instead of carefully examining data between control and experimental conditions, neuromarketing studies often jump to conclusions about what a jump in something like an EEG signal mean about how the study subject is thinking or feeling.

An experimenter might observe a change in the EEG signal and infer that this means the participant is paying more attention. Unfortunately, logically this doesn't work. Nothing has been systematically manipulated or tested, so this is not a safe assumption. The signal change might be because a participant just thought about his boyfriend, or experienced an itch on her foot, or felt hungry, or any number of other possible things. There is no unique brain signature of any particular cognitive or emotional state that can be seen with current technology. Labelling a set of brain data as a signal of attention or anxiety based on previous experimental findings is similar to saying "tomatoes are red, this apple is red, therefore this apple is a tomato." It's plainly nonsense.

Until more rigorous scientific standards come into play, it's pretty hard to say what your brain really thinks about that ad campaign.

Read the whole piece here.

    


Researchers Successfully Implant Mice With False Memories

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What Is Real?

This is a general lab mouse, not one of the mice described below.

Rama on Wikimedia Commons

So it is possible.

Call it cool or just plain creepy: Memory researchers from U.S. and Japan have, for the first time, implanted false memories into a lab animal.

The researchers made mice believe that they had once received electrical shocks in their feet while sitting in a certain little chamber, even though that had never happened. Thereafter, whenever the researchers put the mice in that chamber, the mice would freeze up in a typical mouse response to fear.

It's already clear that people are able to form false memories. Think about that family tale about your getting sick at Disneyland-the one that's been told so often, you've felt yourself "remember" the event more and more over the years, even though you were way too young to truly recall it. Or, more seriously, think about how often eyewitness testimony fails, convicting people who are later exonerated through DNA testing.

"So this false memory is a serious social problem," Susumu Tonegawa, a biologist at MIT and the lead researcher in the new mouse study, tells Popular Science. (You may recognize Tonegawa's name because he won a Nobel Prize in 1987 for research into the immune system.) "False memory in a human," Tonegawa clarifies.

So what's the good of putting false memories in mice? Having a technique to do this could help other scientists study false memories more in depth, using mice, Tonegawa says. In the future, such studies could lead to a better understanding of how false memories form in people. Meanwhile, Tonegawa and his colleagues have already used their mice to discover one thing. On the molecular level, false memories in mice look a lot like real ones.

"They are really similar in terms of underlying mechanisms," he says. "So it's not surprising in humans when some of them insist false memories are true."

Other researchers previously created 10-second artificial memories in mouse brain cells grown in a test tube. Another team also made false hybrid memories in living mice. Tonegawa's team's research took another step forward by apparently creating a whole new memory of danger in a chamber where mice had never received shocks.

To make their fake mouse memories, Tonegawa and his team relied on two previous bits of research, one of them their own. The first was optogenetics, a way of tinkering with mouse genetics so that some of a mouse's brain cells are sensitive to laser light. The second was research Tonegawa's lab published in 2012, showing that they were able to use optogenetics to stimulate a packet of brain cells associated with one memory in mice.

This time, the team put mice in a chamber, very creatively named "Context A." You can also think of Context A as the Safe Room. Context A had a particular shape, smell and lighting. The researchers took note of what cells in the mice's brains were associated with exploring Context A.

Then they put the mice in different chamber, Context B, that had a different shape, smell and lighting. They gave the mice electric shocks in their feet while they were hanging out in Context B. (So Context B is the Danger Room.) At the same time, the researchers also used laser light to stimulate the brain cells associated with Context A, the Safe Room.

If you think this sounds like a recipe for some really messed up memories, you'd be right. Now, the mice would freeze in fear whenever researchers put them in Context A, even though they had never received shocks while in Context A. "The animal made a memory of something that did not actually happen," Tonegawa says. And it wasn't that the mice learned to fear chambers in general. When researchers put them in a new chamber, Context C, they didn't freeze.

The team also performed further experiments that showed that the formation of true and false memories both set off a series of molecular changes in the brain that are very similar. So false memories may feel indistinguishable from real ones.

Tonegawa and his colleagues published their work today in the journal Science.

    


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